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IMAGINARY 
OBLIGATIONS 

By 
FRANK MOORE COLBY 




NEW YORK 

DODD, MEAD & COMPANY 

1904 



LIB(?«WV tf OOWQRFSS 

two OfWiW ffM*«»v»0 

SEP 2? 1904 
^^Oowrfght Entry 

CLASS ^ XXo. H<x 

* COPY B 






Copyright, 1904 
By DoDD, Mead and Company 



Published September, 1904 



PREFACE 

I PRESUME it will not be denied that the Anglo- 
Saxon conscience is apt to encroach on the zone 
of moral indifference. We are a hortatory peo- 
ple, forever laying down the law in a region 
where diversity is most desirable. Apparently 
we would rather teach than live ; we count votes 
even in our dreams ; and we suppress nine-tenths 
of our thoughts for fear of seeming incorrect. 
We are sometimes frank in private, but coram 
populo our souls are not our own. In proof 
whereof see any magazine or newspaper or almost 
any current book or play, and mark especially 
the amazing difference between public speeches 
and private thoughts. There are the romantics 
of politics, and the self -concealment of debate, 
and the duty to the crowd, and the duty to the 
coterie, and the duty to the time of day, and the 



PREFACE 

constraint of success, and the fear of being mis- 
understood, and the care of the universe, and the 
hundred other anxieties that make up our chief 
imaginary obHgation to seem something different 
from what we are — something wiser or more 
sententious or more brilliant or more reasonable 
and educational, something far less human and 
infinitely less absurd. We cannot even see a man 
with a book without worrying over the effect it 
may have on him, and we would turn every critic 
into a sort of literary legislator. We try to 
compel good taste and the harmless word "cul- 
ture" has already acquired a grim and horrid 
sound. On the lightest of matters we lay the 
heaviest of hands. At every point our indefati- 
gable instructors would substitute a formula for 
a vital process. Our fancied obligations to these 
little formulas are for the most part the subject 
of this book, which is made up of certain news- 
paper and magazine articles, edited and rear- 
ranged. The topics discussed are transitory, 
but they are bound to recur, and the writings 
quoted are evanescent but they are of a kind that 



PREFACE 

often return. I have written about them because 
I enjoyed their absurdity, but incidentally they 
may show why so many of us grow old rigidly or 
develop an alarming spiritual pomposity in our 
middle age. 



CONTENTS 

I 

ON LITERARY COMPULSION 

I BOOKS WE haven't READ 1 

II A PROBLEM OF CULTURE 7 

III LITERARY BURROWING 13 

IV THE DIFFERENCE OF PRINT 17 

V THE WRITER WHO DOES NOT CARE 25 
VI THE LITERARY TEMPERAMENT 33 

II 

THE CROWDED FORUM 

I THE NATIONAL ANGLE 40 

II "AMERICANISM*' 49 

ni CONCERNING HEROES 54 

IV A "remarkable" man 60 

V OLD AND NEW DEBATERS 64 
VI ASPERITIES OF PEACEMAKING 70 

VII MEASURING AN AMERICAN REPUTA- 
TION 77 
VIII DEMOCRATIC GENTILITY 83 

III 

THE FRIGHTENED MINORITY 

I SETTING THE PACE gg 

II THE WALK UPTOWN 95 



CONTENTS 

III THE READING PUBLIC 99 

IV REFORMERS AND BROOMSTICKS 109 

IV 
ADVENTURES OF A PLAYGOER 

I ON SEEING TEN BAD PLAYS 118 

II THE SPAN OF THE STAGE 128 

III ON CERTAIN "pROBLEm" PLAYS 134 

IV CONVENTIONAL PLAYS 145 

V PRIVATE TASTES AND PRINTED CRITI- 

CISM 151 

V 
RIGOURS OF EDUCATION 

I BACCALAUREATE SERMONS 167 

n THE SIGNIFICANCE OF FRESHMEN 172 

ni THE CO-EDUCATION SCARE 178 

IV THE TRAINED WOMAN 182 

V EDUCATIONAL EMOTIONS 189 
VI INNER CIRCLES 194 

VI 

ON CERTAIN PEDANTRIES 

I THE DRIER CRITICISM 200 

n PAINSTAKING ILLITERACY 205 

m THE HAND OF PROVIDENCE 210 

IV NOTHING NEW 216 

V LITERARY ANALYSIS 221 
VI OUTDOOR PEDANTRY 226 

Vn A POPULARIZER 234 



CONTENTS 

VII 
MINOR OPPRESSIONS 

I THE SUMMER EXPERIMENT 239 

n THE PEOPLE NEXT DOOR 244 

HI THE CHEERFUL GIVER 249 

IV THE SERIOUS WOMAN 254 

V MUSIC AT MEALS 260 

VIII 
THE BUSINESS OF WRITING 

I LITERARY REPUTATIONS 265 

II THE PRAISE OF MINOR AUTHORS 271 ^^ 

III THE PHASEMAKER 279 » \ 

IV THE PURSUIT OF HUMOR 284 

V THE TEMPTATION OF AUTHORS 289 
VI THE JOURNALIST AND HIS BETTERS 295 

VII RUNNING AN ORACLE 301 

VIII FOR WOMAN AND THE HOME 306 

IX ON BEHALF OF OBSCURE VERSE 315 

X IN DARKEST JAMES 321 



PART I 

ON LITERARY COMPUL- 
SION 



BOOKS WE HAVEN'T READ 

A WRITER on French literature contrasts the cul- 
tivated Frenchman's definite knowledge of his 
own classics with the miscellaneous reading of the 
Anglo-Saxon of the same class. In France there 
are certain things that people with a taste for 
reading are supposed to know, and do know. 
With us there is no safety in this assumption. 
The greater variety of our literature and the 
flexibility of our standards account in his opinion 
for the difference. It is a comfortable way of 
putting the thing, and we need the suggestion, 
for we are always setting up standards in this 
1 



ON LITERARY COMPULSION 

matter and tormenting ourselves and others for 
non-conformity. The truth is there are nine and 
sixty ways of reading our tribal lays as well 
as of making them. There is no path in reading 
which we can safely advise another grown-up 
Anglo-Saxon person to follow, and there is no 
single book for not reading which he can de- 
servedly be brought to shame. Yet, for certain 
neglects of this sort we actually persecute. It 
is a mild form of persecution, but it causes 
needless suffering and, what is worse, it begets 
lies. 

Pride of reading is a terrible thing. There 
are certain literary sets in which the book is an 
instrument of tyranny. If you have not read 
it you are made to feel unspeakably abject, for 
the book you have not read is always the one 
book in the world that you should have read. 
It is the sole test of literary insight, good taste 
and mental worth. To confess that you have 
not read it is to expose yourself as an illiterate 
person. It is like admitting that you have 
never eaten with a fork. Now, when this social 



ON LITERARY COMPULSION 

pressure is brought to bear upon a man, what 
happens? This depends on his moral character. 
If there is a flaw in it anywhere, it breaks down. 
Weak, sensitive persons will invariably stammer 
out a lie. The temptation to escape the ignom- 
iny is irresistible. The have-reads are hard, in- 
solent and cruelly triumphant. The haven't- 
reads feel that they must either tell lies or slink 
away. Then there are all sorts of miserable 
compromises. Without actually saying that he 
has read one of the obligatory books, a weak 
character will act as if he had. He ven- 
tures a few of those vague, universal com- 
ments which he knows are bound to be true of 
anything, anywhere. But it is a wretched piece 
of business, and most harrowing to the nerves. 
The awful fidgetiness of a poor baited unread 
man, when he thinks he is being cornered, is 
pitiful to see. Next comes the stage of involun- 
tary deceit. By talking about books as if he had 
read them he comes to think that he has. He 
uses third-hand quotations as if they were his 
own. At this point humbug enters the heart; 



ON LITERARY COMPULSION 

the mind, as you might say, becomes encrusted 
with its own pretence. Finally, there is literary 
second childishness, oblivion and death. Some 
choose the more virtuous course by reading books 
just to say they have read them, thereby saving 
their souls, perhaps, but certainly swamping 
their intellects. 

All this in a field where you can do and say 
exactly what you please, where there is even a 
premium on a whim. Where is the sanction for 
these grim obligations ? How big a bibliography 
goes to make a man of culture ? What course of 
summer reading would have been equally suitable 
for Carlyle and Charles Lamb? A list of our 
unread books torments some of us like a list of 
murders. Yet it is not they but the books we 
have read that will accuse us. Just here we find 
a consolation. Frankly confessed ignorance of 
a book never bores any one and does no harm. 
Ignorance of books is not infectious, but sham 
knowledge of them is. The real offence is read- 
ing in such a way that it leaves you the worse for 
it. One would rather hear some men talk about 
4 



ON LITERARY COMPULSION 

the vegetables they had eaten than the books they 
had read. They put more real feeling into it. A 
small vitality may be smothered by much read- 
ing, and the book-talk of these people is the 
author's deadliest foe. The books we have not 
read may be another way of saying the authors 
we have not injured. The reader is so often un- 
worthy of the book. 

We need all the comfort we can get. Small 
literary ambitions trip up many of us every day. 
Many a man lives beyond his literary income 
from an absurd kind of book pride. Why should 
we not own up like Darwin — change the subject 
to earthworms if they interest us more? There 
was more "literary merit" in what he said of 
earthworms than in what most of us say about 
belles-lettres. It is not the topic that gives the 
literary quality. And we never can finish our 
course of reading. We shall all be tucked 
away in our graves with a long list of good 
things still unread. But if we have not lied 
about these or humbugged ourselves about the 
others or staled any good man's memory by 
5 



ON LITERARY COMPULSION 

feeble-minded repetitions, we may be saved. 
Otherwise we shall be snubbed by every author 
across the Styx. And if the only thing a multi- 
tude of books have done for a man is to enable 
him to mention them and quote them and appear 
to be in the "literary swim," he is no fit person 
for the company of honest authors. He does not 
belong in Arcadia at all, but behind the counter 
in a retail book-shop, where there is a good busi- 
ness reason for plaguing other people about the 
books they haven't read. By these and kindred 
reflections we may console ourselves in part for 
our deficiencies and ward off the temptation of 
the sham. 



\ 



ON LITERARY COMPULSION 

II 

A PROBLEM OF **CULTURE" 

Every little while there appears an article on 
current American literature that takes all the 
hope and self-confidence out of you — that is, if 
you had any idea of keeping up with the times. 
There are so many authors that the writer knows 
and you do not. Sometimes you never heard their 
names at all. Sometimes you have heard their 
names and nothing more. Then comes this ter- 
ribly well-informed person implying in every- 
thing he says that greatness in a dozen different 
fields has wholly escaped your notice. Poets 
piping the sweetest kind of things at your very 
doors, and you never hear them. Stupendous 
"local color" work going on at every railway 
junction, and you heed it not. I have been read- 
ing an article of this kind in one of our most 
serious magazines. It deals with the progress of 
literature in the southern states, and though the 
writer says he leaves out many names of equal 
importance with those mentioned, he goes far 

7 



ON LITERARY COMPULSION 

enough to convince you that you must always 
remain illiterate. There is no chance of catch- 
ing up now. 

Here, for example, is a mere fraction of the 
literature that is waiting for you in the several 
states. In Kentucky there is a school of lyric 
poetry, "quite unique, with Mr. Lane, Mr. Cox, 
Mr. Johnson and Mr. Perkins as its chief lyrists." 
Do you know them all? Why not.? "In Ten- 
nessee Mr. Withers and Mr. B. F. Boole are writ- 
ing creditable verse." To skip Withers and 
Boole is to cut out the very heart of culture. 
Then there is Mr. Bowles of Arkansas, who is 
doing wonders for that state. Bowles of Arkan- 
sas has "a polish that suggests some subtle con- 
nection between cypress groves and the classics." 
Professor Slope is doing even more for North 
Carolina, where he is not only "publishing credit- 
able poetry," but spreading fiction. And "pass- 
ing softly over South Carolina (very softly, for 
fear of waking up J. Gordon Coogler of Colum- 
bia) we find Georgia illuminated by the talent of 
Mr. Hodges and Mr. Norris." Some of them 
8 



ON LITERARY COMPULSION 

you will know, of course. It is not likely, for 
instance, that Professor Slope's work in North 
Carolina has been unnoticed, or that you are 
wholly ignorant of what Miss Beatrice Sim- 
mons is doing in Alabama. But did you know 
that Texas had its Bagby.'^ 

If the list were exhaustive one would not feel 
so much abashed at his ignorance of a part of it, 
but these are only a few of the very greatest 
names, and with these the writer feels it safe to 
assume that every educated person is familiar. 
He has a hundred others in reserve. A short 
time before this article was printed, a professor 
of literature had counted up contemporary Amer- 
ican novelists, including only those whose work 
had real significance and was sure to live forever. 
There were sixty-six of them. In no other class 
of men do you find such indomitable energy as in 
these writers on American literature. It is a life 
of heroic sacrifice and incessant toil, for no man 
could possibly be so thorough in this field unless 
he confined himself strictly to it and labored day 
and night. With sixty-six American novelists 



ON LITERARY COMPULSION 

to be conscientiously studied and appraised, he 
cannot fritter away his time with the classics, and 
if he turns his attention for one instant to what 
is going on abroad he is bound to skip some one 
in Nebraska or Oregon. For say what you will, 
a man's reading power is limited, and thorough- 
ness nowadays is to be had only by concentration. 
I do not deny that a man may read occasionally 
in Shelley or Heine or Browning and at the same 
time keep his eye on Bowles of Arkansas and 
Slope of North Carolina. But I do argue that 
it is a dangerous business to divide his time in 
this way if he aims at thoroughness. For it is 
not as if there were merely Slopes and Bowleses. 
There are Lanes, Booles, Witherses and Bagbys 
by the dozen, and the mind that shall grasp all 
these and retain them permanently must not be 
distracted. 

In regard to "creditable verse" I go even fur- 
ther. It is safer in this field to specialize by 
states. No one should try and keep track of the 
"creditable verse" in the whole country. Unless 
he has a very remarkable mind he will surely be 
10 



ON LITERARY COMPULSION 

superficial and very likely unjust. There are 
no statistics of "creditable verse," but from com- 
mon observation I know there is not a state in the 
Union that does not raise enough of it to take 
all one man's time measuring it off and ticketing 
it. And any one who sets himself the task of 
reading all of it has no right to expect any time 
to spare for verse that is more than creditable. 
That is the puzzling thing about these articles on 
contemporary writers. They present problems 
of specialization in their most baffling form. 
Those robust and even-tempered people seem not 
to be aware of them. Signs of increasing liter- 
ary activity fill them with the most amazing 
cheerfulness. There is a poet out in Arizona 
now, they will say, and he is turning out reason- 
ably good verse quite rapidly. They speak of 
him as if he were a new water- works. To our 
weaker or more indolent minds that discovery 
would be an embarrassment. It is tantalizing 
to hear of another fairly good poet. What is 
to be done with him? There are very few of us 
who have finished with the other kind of poets. 
11 



ON LITERARY COMPULSION 

You must cut somewhere, for life is short. In 
the long run the choice will narrow down to this 
alternative: Either you will seek culture by a 
;ourse of reading under the direction of these 
writers and give up your life to it ; or you will 
grow so callous that the setting up of a new and 
serviceable poet in a western town will excite 
you no more than the opening of a new cigar 
shop. 



12 



ON LITERARY COMPULSION 

III 

LITERARY BURROWING 

The Iliad is a great symbolical poem, accord- 
ing to a certain critic, because Homer makes a 
group of old men, on seeing Helen pass by, re- 
mark : "After all, she was worth it," or words to 
that effect. This, according to our commenta- 
tor, proves that the Iliad contains a great moral 
idea; in other words, is symbolical. Now, 
Homer was the most utterly unsymbolical person 
(if he was a person) that ever enjoyed good 
health. He never had anything of that kind the 
matter with him, and his poems are as free from 
it as they are from germs. The way our sophis- 
ticated modern critic will read complex innuen- 
does into what is elemental is enough to wear 
one's patience to the bone. Must poor old 
Homer father a lot of esoteric things? Is the 
Iliad to have four or five layers of meaning, one 
below the other, like a pile of sandwiches? This 
digging up of unsuspected meanings goes too 
far. It spoils a poem to be all the time spading 
IS 



ON LITERARY COMPULSION 

it or boring through its imagery with a steam 
drill. These critics spend too much of their time 
underground, and they look pale and unwhole- 
some when they come up. And it often happens 
that what they bring up is something they have 
dropped themselves. There are commentators 
who have been digging all their lives and come 
up with their own pocket handkerchief. They 
expect you to be glad about it. They think a 
poet, like a dog, no sooner happens on a good 
thing than he wants to bury it. 

A few years ago an inmate of one of our state 
asylums was taken out for a walk in a pleasant 
park. As soon as his keeper's back was turned 
he jumped down a manhole and ran along a sewer 
main. When dug up at great expense he com- 
plained of the interference, saying he was "keep- 
ing store" down there. So of a symbolist when 
you let him into a poem. One would think 
Homer might have escaped this. The meaning 
of the Iliad is so accessible it seems foolish to 
try and enter it through a gopher hole. But if 
we must, we must. Helen is divine beauty; 
14 



ON LITERARY COMPULSION 

Menelaus is the soul ; Paris the heart of human- 
ity; Nestor the onlooking, judging thought; 
Thersites the ego, and Achilles the personification 
of world energy. And whenever one of them 
does anything it means six or eight other things, 
and they never can take a step without leaving a 
footnote. Then it will amount to something to 
say you understand Homer. It will rank you 
among the seven deepest thinkers in the world, 
and even in regard to the other six you may rea- 
sonably entertain suspicions. 

That is really the ambitious motive at the root 
of this kind of criticism. Below every great 
poem there is a little subterranean aristocracy 
where rank is measured by its distance from the 
surface. Each is aiming at the point furthest 
down. A few years ago a Shakespearian critic 
showed that when Falstaff was made to babble of 
green fields he was really quoting from one of the 
psalms. This proved that he had received a re- 
ligious education, and was probably a choir boy 
in his youth. The man who hit upon this illumi- 
nating thought was for weeks a marvel among 
15 



ON LITERARY COMPULSION 

critics. Since then they have no doubt found 
FalstafF to be nine different kinds of an allegory ; 
so rapidly does the work advance. Why need 
every honest poet be suspected of leading a quad- 
ruple life ? Sometimes the second or third mean- 
ing is less interesting than the first, and the only 
really difficult thing about a poem is the critic's 
explanation of it. But active minds must find 
employment, and if you cannot burrow how can 
you be deep? And if you are not deep you are 
that wretched, vulgar thing, a casual reader, and 
will be snubbed to the end of your days by these 
haughty troglodytes. So when one of them 
comes along, never let him see you feeding on the 
surface of a poem. Dive to the bottom like a 
loon. You can bring up queer things from be- 
low as well as he. Swear you got them from the 
deepest part. Then he will feel degraded and 
superficial and blush awkwardly like a casual 
reader. 



16 



ON LITERARY COMPULSION 

IV 

THE DIFFIDENCE OF PRINT 

The moralists who are forever discussing the 
behaviour of newspapers pay no attention to the 
reader's main complaint. You might think from 
the criticism of newspapers that it was all a mat- 
ter of tall headlines, slander and sensation. Start 
a reform movement, and that is the sort of thing 
it aims at. But why not own up? Our main 
grudge is against the most respectable. What 
if the people you met talked like a newspaper — 
never made an admission or saw but one side, 
never retracted except on compulsion or paused 
in the praise of themselves ? Suppose their cause 
is a good one, do you like them for licking its 
boots ? Consider that awful thing they call "the 
policy." There is nothing more amazing to the 
reader than the way a mind can be wrapped in a 
"policy." Many a decorous newspaper is edited 
by a moral papoose. In private life "the policy" 
would make you talk in epitaphs of last year's 
opinions, hook your fancy to a foregone conclu- 
17 



ON LITERARY COMPULSION 

sion, turn your mind into a bare card catalogue 
of the things you used to think. But being a 
man and not a newspaper, you can blame a work- 
ingman to-day and a capitalist to-morrow. Rules 
are good, but an exception is no sacrilege, and 
there is no fact on earth that a grown man need 
hide from and no cause in Heaven that is worth 
his cheating for. 

So it might be with newspapers, but they 
seem by nature secretive. Are you for Our 
President? Behold, we are at his feet. Are 
you against him, kind reader .?* Here, then, 
are ten more Philippine atrocities of which 
nine rest on no evidence, but we count them in for 
the good of the cause. Do the facts seem against 
us this morning.'^ Then here goes for "Rug- 
weaving in Armenia," or, "Does a College Educa- 
tion Pay.?" We trust it will not be suspected 
that we are dodging the point. Here is the for- 
lorn little editor, so afraid of things as they are 
that he is doomed for months to total irrelevancy ; 
and there is the praiser of corporations who dares 
not stop ; and this is Mr. Pecksniff's paper with 
18 



ON LITERARY COMPULSION 

the luxuriant moral and the little meannesses that 
destroy the vines. The types are familiar in 
every large city. Where are the people who like 
them? Yet they are clean and respectable, and, 
like most of our pet aversions, are safely within 
the law. Criticism in private takes these lines. 
Public criticism — the kind that comes from the 
pulpit or is engrossed in resolutions — aims only 
at what is gross and palpable. It blames the 
license of the press, when our main grievance is 
its strange constraints and silences. In spite of 
the great improvement in the news columns, the 
comment that gives personal character has in the 
past fifteen years grown so feeble that many talk 
of giving it up altogether and leaving us alone 
with the reporters. 

It is a loss to American letters. No matter 
how well news is gathered or how accurately told, 
the time will never come when we are content with 
bare narration. Those frank and inspiriting little 
newspaper essays were about the best things 
Americans ever did with their pen, but what with 
the death of some men and the deliquescence of 

19 



ON LITERARY COMPULSION 

others, they are now on the level with our books. 
It is not a matter of premises or principles or 
morals in the conventional degree. We are 
friendly and inquisitive little animals, and the 
man is the main thing, after all, and there is 
never a moment when we would not rather meet 
a real one than look at a panorama of world 
politics or see a gas-tank explode. The newest 
thing in the world is a new way of looking at an 
old one, and the greatest thing that ever hap- 
pened is what somebody happened to think. 
People read newspapers more for company than 
for guidance; and their criticism is nine-tenths 
epicurean. Virtue is safe, but the mind feels 
lonesome in most things that we read. A re- 
former never seems to miss anything not men- 
tioned in a moral code, but it is not so with the 
rest of us. 

Here we read: "Another saddening proof 
of the havoc the war spirit has wrought 
among us is afforded by the shocking scandals in 
the Jonesville post-office. 'War is hell,' says 
Burke. It was indeed to be expected that the 
20 



ON LITERARY COMPULSION 

poison would spread from the heart to the mem- 
bers. The government that sanctions a selfish 
and unholy war cannot avoid the logical conse- 
quences, and from rapine and torture in the 
Philippines it is an easy step to knavery at home. 
'Corrupt the morality at the centre,' said Mil- 
ton, 'and the devil will ramp on the perimeter.' 
The return of the proconsul laden with booty 
affords his fellow-citizen no safer example than 
he did in the days of Tacitus, and the warning 
that Sallust sounded to the venal city soon to 
perish (mature perituram) might well have been 
meant for us." Academic and in a sense con- 
scientious, but where is the man on the premises? 
Or again, let the poor old Job of a public hearken 
unto the son of Barachel the Buzite : "Once more 
with characteristic vigor and common sense Presi- 
dent Roosevelt has utterly confounded the as- 
sailants of the Administration and vindicated the 
honor of the nation. Not a shred remains of 
the charges against the army or the government. 
No one can now doubt that the headquarters of 
the Philippine revolt were in Boston, and fresh 
21 



ON LITERARY COMPULSION 

reports from Manila daily confirm the belief that 
but for treachery in this country the insurrection 
would not have lasted a day. President Roose- 
velt is not the man to shirk responsibility. As 
he said in his address to the Yale students, 'What 
this country needs is men that can bite.' Wise, 
statesmanlike and courageous, he has the people 
with him. 'Breathe hard,' said he at the Seattle 
Young Ladies' Seminary, waving a Rough Rider 
flag, 'play hard, rest hard, work hard ; up and 
at it, no matter what it is.' Nothing could bet- 
ter express his own spirit and that of the Amer- 
ican people." This is the way men divide in 
print, but there is nothing like it in nature. No- 
body's private opinions ever take this form. It 
is the monochrome of party and the stage neces- 
sity of debate, the twang of the pen and the 
hypocrisy of the ink-bottle which make the differ- 
ence between men and editors. It is not an affair 
of the heart. 

Men are never so prim and starchy, so deeply 
dyed and terribly committed in real Hf e. Many 
an honest fellow-being, full of earnest whims and 



ON LITERARY COMPULSION 

pleasing foibles, variegated, complex, alive and 
charming, goes down into print as into a sar- 
cophagus, and when jou mourn his loss thinks you 
are trifling with the sound moral sentiment en- 
graved on the tomb. Perhaps it comes from 
hearing so much about bringing things "to the 
bar of public opinion" and all that. Perhaps 
it is due to an embarrassed sense of the 
presence of Tom, Dick and Harry. Lowell's 
theory of it was that the soul had done 
something in a pre-existent state it was now 
ashamed of. But the basis of criticism is nega- 
tive — not the sins committed but the pleasures 
withheld — and the pleasure of being talked to as 
an equal is the main thing the readers miss. 
Suppose somebody does misunderstand, or a few 
fat gentlemen fall by the wayside or a spinster 
or two is frightened away, is the thing so grave ? 
Must one feel as pompous as Cicero? Will his 
country come to him in a dream and say, "Mar- 
cus TuUius, what are you doing.?" Let the great 
mind go crashing forth; the casualties will be 
surprisingly small. That is the proper advice 



i 



ON LITERARY COMPULSION 

to give to any American writer. The question 
before the man is what to do in his neutral in- 
tervals, in the holidays of his virtues and the 
pauses of his sin, for there are days and days 
when the moral character needs nothing done to 
it and the politics are all in place, when life may 
be merely lived and the country merely looked at, 
— a time of secular cravings, a permissibly 
mundane time, the days of the devil's siesta, the 
reformer's Saturday nights. But an editor sel- 
dom knows such intervals, for human nature is 
a different thing from print. Pen in hand, he 
believes we do all our thinking in majorities, en- 
joy by popular consent, make friends on prin- 
ciple, — doubts if there is even the larva of an 
imagination or a latent power of pleasant dreams, 
or a tender side toward any mental temptation in 
this exceedingly business-like land. 



24 



ON LITERARY COMPULSION 



THE WRITER WHO DOES NOT CARE 

There is no sign in Kipling's writings that he 
has ever learned anything from his critics or 
made any concessions to his public's demands. 
Take it or leave it, has been his attitude from the 
first. In his own good time, after people had de- 
spaired of him, he wrote Kim. We then told 
him distinctly that was the kind of thing we 
wanted of him, and asked him to do it again ; 
whereupon he undertook the conduct of the Brit- 
ish Government through the agency of bad verse. 
The Islanders may be true and statesmanlike, 
and rifle clubs may be founded on the strength 
of it, and cricketers may hang their heads for 
shame. Some say poetry is as poetry does ; but 
not if it save the British Empire shall we ever 
admit the goodness of this poem or that it is a 
poem at all. It will be classed in the long run 
with Kipling's rhymed journalism, eff'ective but 
transitory, a matter of a few fiery phrases, much 
overstraining and many flat lines. As mere 
^5 



ON LITERARY COMPULSION 

literary pleasure-lovers, his readers have a right 
to complain. Bother his prophecies and devil 
take his reforms and all those ballads with a pur- 
pose, and letters on South Africa, and allegories 
on steam engines, and monodies on quartermas- 
ter's supplies. That is the way they feel 
about it, blaming not so much the subjects 
as Kipling's way with them. Critics who 
praise Kipling's faculty of throwing himself 
into a subject forget that one unfortunate 
result has been his total disappearance in it. 
He paints himself in with his local color. It 
has happened again and again. A man- 
among men, but also a piston-rod among pis- 
ton-rods. Other writers have at one time or 
another paid some attention to criticism. There 
was George Meredith, for instance, whom no one 
would accuse of pliancy. He was swerved en- 
tirely from his early course by adverse criticism. 
And Thomas Hardy, the only other living novel- 
ist of Kipling's rank, was influenced by it to his 
own and our advantage. But from Kipling, as 
from a Tammany water main, we must take 



ON LITERARY COMPULSION 

things as they come, knowing that protests are in 
vain. 

He will not repent, or conform, or edit himself, 
or study how to please. But there is about him a 
sort of surly sincerity even at his worst. He 
at least is interested if you are not. He is 
pleased with each sudden new intimacy and ex- 
asperatingly glib in its jargon and would as lief 
lose readers as not. Bridge-building or what- 
ever it may be — down he goes in it with a horrid 
splash of terminology and remains defiantly unin- 
teresting for months at a time. It is not as if he 
tried to please and failed. It is his mood, not 
yours. He is merely muttering to himself the 
technicalities of his hobby, and criticism cannot 
shake it out of him. In the intervals of some- 
thing like genius he is merely a pig-headed man. 
But the course has some advantages. He never 
does what is expected of him, but he sometimes 
does more. Whatever his sins are, they are not 
sins of subservience, and meanwhile he lives his 
own life. Not that his unliterary activities have 
any value in themselves. Beyond stirring up 

n 



ON LITERARY COMPULSION 

rows and coming some quotable phrases, what 
has he done for poHtics these last few years? 
But looked at as a form of diversion, politics 
have done something for him. 

At all events, he has escaped some of the fatal 
consequences of a literary success. Success is 
usually the result of a sharpened sense of what is 
wanted. As a general rule, the successful writer, 
especially the successful American writer, is a 
man who is disciplined by demand. The vagaries 
of self-expression may do for a few privileged 
characters, but the steady, substantial incomes 
are for those who do what is expected of them. 
Taking it altogether, it is the line of least resist- 
ance, the happy level and the golden average, 
and the best rule for the greatest number, and the 
only safe course a 'priori if you have a family to 
support. Not that they say one thing when they 
particularly want to say another. There is no 
deliberate heterophemy about it. But people who 
get on in the world have developed a sort of 
market nerve and can feel it throbbing in the 
back of the brain. Of many thoughts it auto- 



ON LITERARY COMPULSION 

matically thrusts forward the one that is most 
presentable, and by an instinctive arithmetic 
counts votes on every sentence before it is written 
down. This is the general law of successful liter- 
ary composition, though not so stated in the 
books. The uniformity of American fiction, 
about which so many lose their temper, merely 
shows that our writers have never felt like risking 
much for self-expression, and there is no good 
reason why they should. Sic vos non vohis is 
the motto of all efficient public entertainers. If 
they had any big peculiar ideas, they would prob- 
ably let us have a peep at them. Nothing very 
great is being hidden, we believe. Yet every 
little while a critic attacks them on the ground 
that they ought to do better, and that the best 
selling books are not literature. Aim higher and 
sell less, he says. It is the theory of concealed 
gGnius. Kipling's contemptuous non-conform- 
ity would carry most men straight to the 
poor-house. Nor does it follow that posterity 
will like any better the things that the 
present rejects. The ferocious onslaughts on 



ON LITERARY COMPULSION 

recent American novels are both illogical and 
unfair. 

Still, people have their harmless little peculiar- 
ities, and it has often been noted by observers that 
American writers of fiction are not nearly so much 
alike as their books. Natural diversities linger 
though tucked out of sight by the pen. But it 
has happened often that once in the public favor 
they are never quite the same men again. Suc- 
cess, like a flat-iron, smoothes out the little ir- 
regularities that might just as well have been 
left in, and there are whimsicalities about the 
people that we are apt to miss in their books. 
Caution and self -repression to the extent of hold- 
ing back certain matters that might with perfect 
safety be let go certainly do seem a little over- 
developed in our writers. What with wondering 
whether the editor will like it, and whether 
the public will take to it, and whether the 
critics will see through it, there is little chance 
for merely personal preferences of their own. 
And by the time the habit of pleasing everybody 
is formed, the soul has caught a color that will 



ON LITERARY COMPULSION 

not come out in the wash. Our current literature 
is a literature of suppressed inclinations, some- 
times to our loss. The saddest thing about 
our young authors is the exchange of pos- 
sibilities for dead certainties after they have 
struck their pace. With Kipling, politics serve 
the purpose of a rotation of crops. But here, if 
a writer is silent after his third romantic novel, 
we always know he is working like a beaver on 
his fourth. Something to do during the unin- 
spired intervals is the great need of the calling. 
Even Shakespeare's nature felt the want of it — 
"subdued to what it works in," as he says. Kip- 
ling goes in for prophecy and empire-building 
as a horse goes to pasture, and comes back 
greatly refreshed. If it had not been for the 
intervening years of foolishness he might never 
have given us Kim. That is a cheering thought 
that ought to come to any one who reads The 
Islanders and wonders why such things need be. 
Years ago he gave fair warning he would not 
work with an eye to his public, and he never has. 
Not caring at all how we liked it, he has blundered 
31 



ON LITERARY COMPULSION 

into many things — sometimes a tinker, sometimes 
a counsellor of nations, always certain beyond 
human certainty, and almost always wrong. But 
rested by his many irrelevances and exhilarated 
years of impudence, he comes back to his work 
finally, like Kim from his illicit wanderings, and 
does it better than before. 



ON LITERARY COMPULSION 
VI 

THE LITERARY TEMPERAMENT 

The young heio of Mr. Howell's Letters Home 
is so literary that he can dine gloriously at a 
fifty-cent table d'hote, where on Fridays he mis- 
takes clam chowder for houillabaisse and feels 
like Thackeray when he is eating it. Every one 
he meets is a "type" and every emotion is "ma- 
terial." When consumed by passion he is not too 
preoccupied to note how that passion would look 
in print, and when attacked by the influenza he 
turns his delirium into "copy" that no magazine 
would refuse. He is not especially gifted. He 
has the temperament without the gifts. A 
genius writes in the overflow of life and seems 
to forget he is writing, but our hero could never 
do that. With him the phrase must always come 
first ; his mind is book-bitten and he is doomed to 
edit his life in advance. Hence he never will 
altogether live. People of the literary tempera- 
ment seldom do quite live. They are impeded by 
a too persistent pen-consciousness which is the 



ON LITERARY COMPULSION 

spiritual form of writer's cramp, and while others 
may merely feel, they must be making phrases as 
well as feeling. So by dividing the mind they 
lower the pulse, and they are always a little below 
their vital capacity. If it is a love affair, a part 
of the creature is taking notes and down goes his 
temperature ; if it is an agony he must see to it 
that it bring forth fruit meet for publication. 
"I was as miserable," says this Wallace Ardith in 
Letters Home, "as a guilty wretch can be and 
be conscious of his innocence, but my confounded 
mind kept taking notes of the situation and in a 
hideous way rejoicing in it as material." Mr. 
Howells meant him for a young man, but he 
might be as old as Mr. Howells himself. He 
comes from a town in Iowa, but he might as well 
have been born in Thrums. The essential thing 
is his ingrained literosity. 

We should have liked to see him hanged in the 
end like Sentimental Tommy, but Mr. Howells 
seemed rather fond of him. He showed the clem- 
ency of introspection. Few authors wish to 
hang their Sentimental Tommies after confess- 
34 



ON LITERARY COMPULSION 

ing them. Mr. Barrie is the only Brutus among 
noveHsts, and you cannot read that book of his 
without hearing his self-love groan aloud. To 
the unliterary reader Tommy is merely a vain 
young man, who might even be a hero if the 
author would let him alone, but whenever he is 
most heroic Mr. Barrie is most incredulous. It 
was a grand deed, to be sure, he will say, but 
Tommy would never have done it if there 
had been no women around; and had there been 
no public, there would have been no Tommy at 
all, for he could do nothing for its own sake — not 
even draw a natural breath — but only for the 
sake of having it known that Tommy did it. 
Straightforward inartistic folk cannot make 
out what all this sarcasm is about, but the liter- 
ary temperament blushes up to the roots of its 
hair when it reads it. The book was never ade- 
quately reviewed. It was too brutally intimate 
and indelicately true, too terribly authorish for 
any other author to deal with frankly and retain 
his self-esteem, and for any one not an author or 
an observer of authors to understand. Tommy 
35 



ON LITERARY COMPULSION 

is practically thrown away on any reader who 
has not at least a literary temperament in the 
family. 

The trouble with Tommy was simply that he 
had no private life. Every motive was forked 
like the devil's tail and he did nothing without 
reference to a bystander. The eternal bystander 
is the peculiar gift of the literary temperament. 
Stevenson's fancy would have peopled a desert 
isle, not that he might look at them but that they 
might see Stevenson. Alone under the sky 
the literary temperament still hopes it may 
be discovered, and fancies itself discovered 
when it has given up hope. In the fifth 
century a.d. Tommy would have been a 
pillar saint and stood on one leg and let the 
other rot off, not at all in the fear of the Lord, 
but in the sense of the crowd below and the high 
hope that some day there would be a Saint 
Thomas of Thrums. If there had been no crowd 
below, Tommy would have invented one. 

The loss of the private life is the chief danger 
of the literary temperament. Even Shakespeare 
36 



ON LITERARY COMPULSION 

feared it when he wrote that his nature was sub- 
dued to what it worked in Hke the dyer's hand. 
"The world is too much with us," said Words- 
worth suddenly aware that the public had grown 
into him and that his soul had no songs without 
words and that the primrose on the river's brim 
a four-line stanza was to him and nothing more. 
Had it not been for that he would have had 
glimpses, standing on that pleasant lea, that 
would have made him less forlorn. But writers 
of this class are in no real danger. The risk is 
run on the lower plane, where life, like a maga- 
zine poem, is written before it is felt and 
thoughts are tried on like hats to see if they are 
becoming and the land is only local color and the 
sea is made of ink. That is where the Tommies 
are, among the best-selling heroes of the week, 
the impersonal ghosts of current literature, each 
trying to pick out a soul that the reading public 
would like the look of. 

"Now you're looking holy again," said the 
exasperated Aaron when Tommy was planning 
some conspicuous nobility and resolving in his 
37 



ON LITERARY COMPULSION 

mind to look the part and seeing it all in type 
and hearing the reader's comments on it. The 
private life of the two Carlyles must have been 
full of these little calamities, and it certainly 
was not genius that made the pair so uncomfort- 
able. We all love the illusion of spontaneity 
and like to believe that the poet's eye doth 
actually glance from Heaven to earth instead of 
glancing sidewise at the onlooker. It is not 
pleasant to ascertain that Poe's Raven would 
not have been written if he had not happened to 
observe that "Nevermore" would make a musical 
refrain and "Lenore" rhymed with it and that he 
brought in the raven only because nothing but a 
raven would be at all likely to ejaculate "never- 
more" at regular intervals, except possibly a 
parrot, and a parrot would not rhyme with Le- 
nore. Poe's description of his processes set 
many minor poets working wrong-end-to. Nor 
do we like to read how Burke generously tinkered 
poor Crabbe's poem and Johnson lent his heavy 
hand and Crabbe accepted everything as more 
likely to beguile the public, forgetting by that 



ON LITERARY COMPULSION 

time that he had started out with anything of 
his own. But while the most gifted sometimes 
sink to it, the merely clever never rise above it, 
and they leave you wondering whether there is 
anything in them that the public did not put 
there. That is why Miss Emily Dickinson ex- 
claimed that she liked a look of agony because 
she knew it was real and why Kingsley advised 
everybody to be only good and "let who will be 
clever," and why Hotspur called poetry the 
"forced gait of a shuffling nag" and why some- 
times after a brilliant literary meeting where 
authors read their papers our heart goes out to 
the simple and spontaneous, natural and single- 
minded cow who never flourishes her tail for our 
sakes, but to remove from her actual haunches an 
authenticated fly. The literary emotions are so 
seldom authenticated in the secondary ranges of 
art. 



PART II 

THE CROWDED FORUM 

I 

THE NATIONAL ANGLE 

People who think we are, as a nation, no longer 
sensitive to criticism, should have followed the 
comments upon a certain little volume of essays 
on American traits dealing with our faults of 
character in an entertaining way. The author 
was a German who for several years had been a 
professor in one of our universities. It is writ- 
ten, the author tells us, "from a German point of 
view," though there was not the least need of his 
mentioning it, and it was not what you would call 
a serious contribution to political science, but 
was, perhaps, the better reading on that account. 
40 



THE CROWDED FORUM 

Like most of these comparative race studies, it 
drew its material mainly from the writer's pa- 
triotic heart. He likes his own land better, and 
emphatically tells us why, as if anybody could 
not give reasons for a thing like that. It was 
matter for toasts, poems, flag-raisings, and hochs 
— a sheer animal preference for one's own; yet 
critics took it as seriously as if it were an at- 
tempt in pure philosophy. They blamed him 
for not having a judicial mind; though why an 
expatriated gentleman, terribly homesick, no 
doubt, should be expected to have one, it is not 
easy to make out. Yet they argued it out with 
him painfully, as if there were some logical proc- 
ess for rebutting his German blood. We are still 
very touchy, and these comparisons of foreigners 
do still most unaccountably flutter us, and there 
is invariably a little chorus of tu quoques and a 
sort of patriotic huff and a long ingenuous 
wrangle over things no more debatable than a 
taste in wives and children. No visitor can take 
notes on us, even now, without starting one of 
these queer controversies, and (self-esteem being 
41 



THE CROWDED FORUM 

the most voluble of the emotions) there is no 
small amount of printed matter taken up with 
them first and last. Great masses of mankind 
are weighed one against one another, as in the 
hand of Allah, and "these to Heaven and I care 
not, and those to Hell and I care not ;" and the 
nativity of the umpire determines which is which. 
German ideals, says the Professor, without the 
least tremor of indecision, are higher than Amer- 
ican ideals ; to which an American writer retorts 
excitedly, "But you must admit in common fair- 
ness that American ideals are broader at the 
base." No one knows what they mean exactly, or 
how they found it out. But we all do know 
where their hearts are — honest folk, perched 
each on his national angle and crowing with all 
his might. Not to say a word against the national 
angle. Prceter omnes angulus ridet — or ought 
to, whosoever it is. But why this solemn show of 
reasons for things that were bred in the bone? 

It is a most beatific bias, and a man ought to 
be proud of it ; and for my part, were I ever to 
embark in such a controversy, I should go in 



THE CROWDED FORUM 

singing the battle-cry of freedom, knowing per- 
fectly well I could never be quite fair-minded to- 
ward other people's fatherlands, no matter how 
hard I tried. Nor would I disguise the fisticuffs 
of self -vindication under any show of compara- 
tive philosophy ; and in reply to the man who 
sized up our country in a sentence, I should dis- 
pose of Germany in four scorching words — that 
is, if I did anything about it at all, which, on 
second thoughts, is doubtful. There may be 
philosophers who fish all their patriotism out of 
comparative statistics ; but it is not the usual 
way, and most of our foreign observers bring 
their conclusions with them as part of their racial 
physique. So it was with the Professor, whose 
mind sweeps all history and forms of government 
and spans two continents in a flash. His book is 
a series of lover's comparisons, and we are the 
other girls. Very telling comparisons, some of 
them. "Whenever a genius is needed, democracy 
appoints a committee," says he. Ach Gott! the 
land where geniuses are as common as committees. 
Liebf Heimat land; liehf Heimat land! 
43 



THE CROWDED FORUM 

Were the writings on America stripped of all 
national prejudices and personal whims, they 
would be about as lively as a school atlas ; and for 
all our anger at Dickens fifty years ago, we 
know if he had written fairly we should not have 
read him at all. A man cannot always be in a 
battle mood about his country. There is some 
fun to be had at her expense. The heights of 
oratorical tradition are not for every-day use, 
though we can climb up to them after dinner 
when there is a big enough crowd. They are 
chiefly for the people who have some vested in- 
terest in bombast, and it often happens that the 
gran(^est public tributes are saluted with private 
grins. Foreigners never make allowance for the 
great, fatuous platform-change that comes over 
certain of our people whenever they rise to speak. 
"Builfl, build," said a Western Senator ; build 
and expand and plant the flag on all the archi- 
pelagoes and seize all the canals in this hemi- 
sphere and turn the Pacific Ocean into an Amer- 
ican lake. "This," he concluded, "is not enthu- 
siauth; it is geography." Being used to the 
44 



THE CROWDED FORUM 

thing, we know, of course, it was neither, but 
the mere chest notes of a Senator, a harmless, 
hyperbolical Senator, in a mood of the utmost 
publicity, in a pause of his private faculties, try- 
ing his best to please. "We must be cracked up, 
sir," said Mr. Hannibal Chollop, "this 
country must be cracked up," and Sen- 
ators still live in the Chollop tradition. 
Nor is Mr. Chollop the only type in Martin 
Chuzzlewit that recent speeches recall. Neither 
General Choke nor the Hon. Lafayette Kettle 
could have outdone that speech in Congress, on 
the occasion of Prince Henry's visit, with 
its reference to the German prince as "that little 
Dutchman," and to the "truckle-ency" of foreign 
courts. It was the very language of Dickens's 
burlesque Americans. Foreigners judge us by it 
— all of us. "We have heard," says our latest 
observer, "through the whole scale, from the edi- 
torials of the yellow press to the orations of lead- 
ing Senators, the voice of that aggressive tem- 
per which waits for an opportunity to show 
American superiority to the world by battles and 
45 



THE CROWDED FORUM 

not by arbitration." He notes among our char- 
acteristics "a bumptious oratory, a flippant 
superficiality of style, a lack of aesthetic refine- 
ment ... a constant exploitation on the part of 
immature young men with loud newspaper 
voices," and so forth. And he bears down on it 
all with argument, page after page of it, to 
prove that Columbia is not really the gem of the 
ocean and the only land of the free. It is like 
rebuking a brass band. That is the way with 
foreigners. They are forever trying to knock 
the wind out of the national superlative — a thing 
that the gods could not do. 

Thence come these absurd discussions with a 
class of people that the rest of us know better 
than ever to reason with. Private thinking sel- 
dom takes this line. One's personal friends 
neither talk like editorials nor feel like Senators, 
and one may travel all day long without meeting 
the "typical" American who figures in the books. 
Foreigners do not realize that the great liturgy 
of buncombe stops at the private door, and that 
even its high priests are none too serious about it 
46 



THE CROWDED FORUM 

after the reporters go. We see the flag too 
often to be stirred by every flap of it, and we 
meet too many fellow-citizens to be sentimental 
about them all, and the Pilgrim Fathers are 
rarely mentioned, and the guns of Manila never 
boom in private conversation, and nobody con- 
gratulates you on freedom of worship, trial by 
jury, or the mounting exports of steel, and you 
go to sleep without dreaming of island empires, 
and you wake up without disparaging Germany. 
These awful burdens are borne only by public 
characters aiming at the lowest wit of the great- 
est number, as practical statesmen will, and under- 
shooting it often, we are bound to say. Public- 
ity exacts of them a show of more emotion than 
they ever privately feel. They must keep their 
love of country at honeymoon heat, poor things ! 
And never was a land so complimented down to 
the last detail. Hosanna to the American po- 
tato! it is forging ahead each year. Yet it is 
wasteful to write a serious book against it, for 
the people who would be likely to read it do not 
need the reproof. And it is a great mistake to 
47 



THE CROWDED FORUM 

rouse those tedious patriots who let drive at the 
writer's country in revenge. And, finally, how 
do the pundits in race traits manage to gather 
so quickly the souls of all the peoples in the hol- 
low of their hands, and why is it that the con- 
clusions of such detached philosophers invariably 
follow the flag? It is a whimsical sort of writ- 
ing, the more whimsical the better, and ought 
never to be measured by its approach to absolute 
truth. 



48 



THE CROWDED FORUM 

II 

"AMERICANISM" 

After all, the crowd certainly likes it — ^the 
kind of speech that a Senator once made at a 
public dinner, which I happen to recall, and if a 
man wants quick returns from bursts of elo- 
quence this is the kind of burst he should carry 
in his manuscript notes. The five hundred din- 
ers received it "with great enthusiasm," and he 
could scarce go on for the "cheers and hand- 
clapping." With any crowd it would have been 
the same. The touch of nature.? Not exactly. 
Only the touch of crowd nature, which rubs off 
when you are alone. In the meanwhile what has 
the man been saying.'' Why, that something or 
other is epoch making; that the situation is in- 
tense ; that the spirit of Puritanism bids us reach 
forth, expand, blow up, roar, and, above all, 
brag that we are God's only this and a heaven- 
born that till the word Americanism sets the 
whole world grinning. "The Pacific is the Amer- 
ican Ocean. The Gulf is an American lake. 



THE CROWDED FORUM 

. . . Our flag floats over the Antilles. . . . And 
when the Stars and Stripes is hauled down in 
Cuba, let it hang awhile at half-mast in mourning 
for the people of Cuba abandoned and the duty 
of the United States deserted. These are epochal 
facts. The future of the world is in our hands." 
This is no one man's view. It is crowd language. 
It is the echo of that lower harmony, that vulgar 
confluence of egotisms by which we tell the crowd 
whether it is washed or unwashed, at a New Eng- 
land dinner or at an Australian korroboree. Why 
call it American? Huxley describes the natives 
of one of the islands visited by the Rattlesnake 
as trying to impress the strangers by galloping 
along the shore, "prancing just as boys do when 
playing horse." It is not peculiar to American 
senators. 

"The Puritan," said the Senator, "had the 
logic of geography, and we his children must 
have it, too. . . . All Atlantic and Pacific canals 
and the future of Central America so far as af- 
fected thereby are American questions — we can- 
not permit a concert of powers in solving them." 
50 



THE CROWDED FORUM 

But since the greater includes the less, why talk 
of the future of Central America? It was the 
future of the world just now. Are we not going 
to have the whole thing then — we, the God's onlys 
and the heaven-sent, and the Je suis moi's and the 
Egomet ipse*s? Only a hemisphere after all? 
Take care or some other Senator will outflap you. 
There may be a bigger dinner and a bigger in- 
spiration and a lower barrier of common sense, 
and some one who will know how to take advan- 
tage of the collective mental slump. There is 
always that danger in these lower appeals. Talk 
of islands and isthmuses, and the next man may 
bid continents. Begin with planetary systems, 
not canals. And though we despise it in private, 
you are quite apt to find that a herd of us will 
first endure, then pity, then hooray. 

"There has come a new turn in the world 
drama," says another orator. "We have taken the 
centre of the stage. . . . We see the faces of the 
nations half sneering, half fearing. . . . The 
world has grown intensely conscious of America." 
This is no new turn. There has never been a 
51 



THE CROWDED FORUM 

moment when a world was not watching us, when 
a continent or two was not amazed by us or a 
hemisphere provoked, when an orator was not 
saying just what Europe thought of us, how 
Asia wondered and Africa winked ; and that man 
is no true patriot who imphes that even for an 
instant we were not the centre of the stage. Nor 
is it a mere matter of nations. It is a cosmic 
affair, with gosgip going on in the Zodiac and a 
rumpus in the Milky Way, Mars sneering, and 
Saturn thunderstruck and an uneasy smile on the 
face of the firmament that ill conceals its fear. 
We hate a cautious patriot who talks like a plum 
when he feels like a pumpkin. It is a generous 
emotion, and why not let it go.? In this mood a 
world is not enough for us ; we bump our heads 
against the sky. 

But the chief danger is the collapse of the 
emotions when the word American has ceased 
thrilling through the orator's nose. How in the 
world can we keep it up? It is not a solitaire 
game. None of us can go on like that all by 
himself under the stars. The heavens are too 



THE CROWDED FORUM 

sarcastic. We are soon feeling uncomfortable 
and hoping nobody heard. Somebody always 
does hear. That is the worst of it. Dickens 
heard, and he gave us Martin Chuzzlewit. A 
few jeer at it as your true Americanism. A few, 
who are deadly serious, prophesy the end of all 
things, inhaling odors from their moral vinai- 
grette. The rest of us understand the oratorical 
traditions and know that patriotism is not de- 
stroyed by burlesque. 



THE CROWDED FORUM 

III 

CONCERNING HEROES 

It was interesting to see how the heroes of the 
South African war weathered the flattery that 
fell upon them. It was a rather hard test of 
character. Lord Roberts came through it with 
all his wits about him and with all his moral 
qualities in trim working order. So, probably, 
did some others ; but, reasoning from precedents, 
it would be surprising if the majority of 
those heroes were not somewhat damaged. 
The odds were against them. By the time the 
public has regained its senses the hero has lost 
his. It is the usual way the story ends, and there 
is no means of insuring him against it. You 
cannot make people moderate toward their heroes 
just for fear of spoiling them. When a gener- 
ous emotion is at high tide and the bands are 
playing and the boys are bellowing through the 
megaphone, and the variously distorted features 
of the idol are displayed from every house front, 
it is not always creditable to be judicious. "He 
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THE CROWDED FORUM 

that hath not a dram of folly in his composition 
hath pounds of a worse material." A man may 
hold himself in check at such a time and say only 
what is wise. It may be that his wisdom domi- 
nates his impulses. But perhaps he lacks the 
impulses. It may be that he has a heart like a 
cash register and a pulse like a cold-boiled ham. 
We cannot admire him until we know. So far 
as he himself is concerned, no man need be 
ashamed of the foolish things he said to or about 
heroes when the fit was on him. As well regret 
the intemperate language of his honeymoon. 

Such regret as one feels should be all on the 
hero's account. He is apt to be in a bad state 
when we are through with him. The majority 
of heroes are not praise-proof. It is nothing 
against a hero that he is not praise-proof. When 
a whole people set out to spoil a man, he is not to 
blame if they succeed. We who are not heroes 
cannot estimate the difficulty of resistance, but 
we can come somewhere near it by multiplying 
our own experience. We know how we feel when 
we are praised. The mind totters under a very 
55 



THE CROWDED FORUM 

moderate amount of it. It must be a rock- 
bound kind of person that remains unmoved when 
a pleasant warm gush of flattery is playing on 
him. The best of us suspend all critical self- 
examination at such a moment, and Heaven 
knows what would happen if the thing lasted. 
It is a joy that fuddles. Fancy it raised to hero- 
power and lasting for twelve months ! Would it 
leave us as it found us.? The chances are we 
should be no fit company for any man. No one 
knows how he would turn out — whether like 
Major GoHath O'Grady Gahagan or like Tour- 
gueniefF's man who forever afterward had "the 
air of his own statue done in bronze and set up 
by national subscription" — ^but something queer, 
you may be sure, and in all probability ridiculous. 
For, as the satirist said of poverty, the worst 
thing about it is that it makes men ridiculous. 
These things have been freshly brought to mind, 
and just now the average man one knows would 
as lief not be a hero. 

What a terrible onslaught was made on those 
heroic men in khaki. Everything was done to 
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shatter their minds and undermine their charac- 
ters. If they were modest about what they had 
done, it only added to the demoralizing din. They 
could not disclaim without redoubling the ap- 
plause. What disgusts at first becomes grad- 
ually endurable, then pleasant, then indispens- 
able, then the hero is lost. The small poets begin 
on him immediately, and the air is soon buzzing 
with little odes. He shakes off the small poet at 
first with some annoyance. When an unspoiled 
warrior is put for the first time into minor verse 
he hates it. It makes him feel like a pressed 
pansy. No living man is a fit subject for 
poetry, and as soon as he feels at home in it that 
is the end of him. Nothing so saps a hero as 
persistent odes, and it is to the credit of the Amer- 
ican people that in spite of their inconsiderate 
waste of heroes they spared them this. Then 
there are the kissing women and the flapping 
orators and the town hall speeches and the free- 
dom of the city and the comparisons with Beli- 
sarius, Caesar, Nelson, any of which, if prolonged, 
will ruin the average hero. It is a cruel thing. 
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The only hope is to do as Kitchener did, or Mar- 
chand or our own Lawton — treat the whole thing 
as a foolish love affair and go back to work. 
The hero should leave the instant he begins to 
take it seriously, if possible before the wind dies. 
A becalmed hero waiting around for more wind is 
in a bad way. So is one who has contracted the 
platform habit. A hero has begun to go to 
pieces when he has learned to like what he ought 
never to have heard. 

A man does a fine thing that takes our fancy, 
so we reward him by denying him the privilege 
of hearing a word of sense for months at a time. 
Then comes a reaction, and we wonder what is 
the matter with him. It was all our fault, and 
the least we can do is to be sorrowfully patient 
with our handiwork. There may be a way of 
repairing the heroes we have damaged, though, as 
Carlyle points out, it is no easy task: "The 
resuscitation of a soul that has gone to asphyxia 
is no momentary or pleasant process, but a long 
and terrible one." A mind ravaged by applause 
deserves charity from the ravagers, and one 
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should know beforehand that it is as hard to keep 
a hero from spoiling on your hands as to keep 
cream through a thunderstorm. 



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IV 

A **REMARKABLE" MAN 

The mention of the Defeated Candidate's name 
in the newspapers sets some old memories to stir- 
ring. So there was such a man, and what a turn 
he gave some of us in the dark days of a certain 
November an age or two ago. It makes one feel 
safe to see the name now; also a little foolish, 
for was there ever a political contest in which the 
enemy seemed only life size.? He is no longer 
"in the public eye," as the magazines say, and 
for that reason it is no doubt improper to speak 
of him, which is a pity on some accounts. When 
a man of this sort is "in the public eye" there is 
no telling anything about his true dimensions. 
He is in there like a cinder and seems stupendous 
till you get him out. Why mention him now? 
To attack him? No more of that. The neces- 
sity of being serious about him was the worst 
hardship of the whole campaign. All that heavy 
moral artillery and handsome political invective 
just for him! No doubt the language was appro- 
60 



THE CROWDED FORUM 

priate to the occasion, but it was not to the man. 
Napoleon at St. Helena, Boulanger in Belgium — 
get the man as far away as possible from the 
occasion if you would se^him as he is. There 
were some "character studies" of him written be- 
fore he was defeated, and very queer things they 
now seem, — mere allegories for the most part, as- 
suming that he was an incarnate Principle, which 
no man ever is. It was a time when realism was 
unsafe. Some would say he compelled the ad- 
miration even of his foes ; for several of the lat- 
ter, while duly disapproving of him, pronounced 
him a "remarkable" man. Publicity always has 
its flunkeys, deferential to anything that has a 
crowd behind it. It is the optimism of a democ- 
racy. The man who carries several states must 
be great, or at least exceptional in some way. 
There is no allowance made for accidents in this 
domain of success. Does the two-spot never 
come uppermost when a big crowd shuffles the 
pack ? 

So it chances that there is nothing in all that 
has been said of the Candidate that in the least 

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applies to the Defeated Candidate, who happens 
to be publishing a newspaper somewhere in the 
west. A page of that publication is worth more 
than all the estimates on either side. In the first 
place the paper does not suggest any moral issue 
at all. The editor may be a good man or a bad 
man — it is hard to realize that it matters which. 
The main point is that he is not a man who would 
arrest attention for one instant. It is a school- 
boy mind that drives that paper, no matter what 
the political writers say. Call him a brilliant 
demagogue, an Orson of the young Democracy, 
an Alcibiades, or whatever you like. His politics 
may be those of Lucifer, but his mind is of the 
age of innocence, whether it is innocent or not. 
That is the striking lesson of it — the amazing 
exiguity of this public man. How did the coun- 
try happen to find him ? And when intellects like 
that are detected, what risks of greatness we all 
run. 

He has put his whole soul into that paper. 
He has struck his natural pace. If any man has 
a partisan grudge against him let him read a 
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THE CROWDED FORUM 

page. Begin, say, with "Not every emperor 
wears a crown," and end with the passage : "Un- 
like Julius Caesar and George Washington, Mr. 
McKinley did not reject the offer of a throne." 
If you were going to mend this man where would 
you begin.? Not with his morals, surely, nor 
even with his politics. What George Eliot called 
the "taint of commonness," hard to describe as 
the odor of onions but just as clearly perceived 
— hangs over the character of this "remarkable" 
man. That he should have run for president 
shows how we let things slide. After that no one 
need despair. Let him push and there is a 
chance that the crowd will let him through. A 
commonplace speech at a hospitable moment may 
be enough for a start, and he, too, may become a 
personage with a career and with people to invent 
a character to account for it. And though he 
may have a hundred thousand duplicates, he will 
be a "remarkable" man till he winds ua,like Bou- 
langer in Belgium or publishing a "remarkable" 
newspaper somewhere in the west. 



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OLD AND NEW DEBATERS 

During the last few years we have plunged 
from one hot debate into another, and if for a 
moment the excitement has subsided over here, 
some other country has been sure to keep our 
feelings busy. Never in their lives have the gen- 
eration born since the civil war seen the civilized 
man so rampant in controversy. One aspect of 
the thing is rather remarkable. This time of 
stress has not produced in the United States or 
England or France a single speech or bit of writ- 
ing above the ordinary. For all the training of 
these great debates there have been no great 
debaters. Other crises have left a legacy of elo- 
quence, but the man who can recall a single elo- 
quent passage in all that has been said on the 
most absorbing topics of the last two years must 
have a memory like a bonded warehouse. To 
most of us it is a mere reminiscence of confused 
noise, the greater part of it inarticulate. The 
occasion has found its men of action but not of 
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speech. The lions that have come up out of 
Judah have not been very impressive in their 
roars. It is not due to any lack of sincerity or 
force of feeling. The blowing up of the 
Maine, the Rennes court-martial, the Boer ulti- 
matum, even the small tempest of the Puerto 
Rican tariff have been stirring enough. It is 
only the art of arguing that has fallen on evil 
days. 

The arguing man assumes as a rule that any- 
thing will do if it seems to be travelling his way. 
He commits himself to all sorts of non-essential 
points. As a Boer sympathizer, for instance, he 
found it his duty to show the trail of the serpent 
in England's entire South African experience 
since 1814, when fifteen years of black iniquity 
would serve his turn as well as eighty-five. So 
he offends the common sense of neutrals. Again, 
he would have free trade in Puerto Rico, let us 
say. Instead of merely pointing out that it is 
preferable, he straightway tells you any course 
but this is hellish inhumanity. So, when you ner- 
vously look up the facts and find nothing in them 
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THE CROWDED FORUM 

to bear out comparisons with the Black Death or 
St. Bartholomew's Day, you are very likely to 
dismiss the whole thing from your mind. That 
is the trouble with our latter-day debaters. They 
breed distrust in the honest doubters. What is 
the use of raising one's whole vocabulary to the 
tenth power? It simply inflates the verbal cur- 
rency. Other people involuntarily extract the 
tenth root of everything you say. The "traitor" 
and "tyrant" of our Philippine discussions have 
weakened debate and lessened the reserve strength 
of the English language. These things become 
merely conventional. They go through the same 
process as profanity, which, as we know, is 
hardly emphatic on the lips of the habitually 
profane. It is a most inartistic kind of arguing 
that gives the impression that you are either talk- 
ing for eff^ect or a little "hipped" on the subject. 
Many a good soul throws his chance away by 
forgetting this. 

The old debaters, whether contending for a 
good cause or a bad, appreciated the value of 
mere plausibility. They counterfeited candor 

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THE CROWDED FORUM 

and sanity if they had them not. Above all, they 
tried to ingratiate by admissions, and they never 
encumbered themselves with big, awkward as- 
sumptions of incredible villainy. Running 
through all the great controversial speeches and 
writings there is a vein of reasonableness and self- 
restraint. Whether it was Lincoln or Burke, or 
a Greek general, or Beelzebub in Paradise Lost, 
or one of Shakespeare's villains, they gave no 
impression of hypocrisy or hysteria. But the 
maladroit debater will somehow give this im- 
pression even though he is as sound in head 
and heart as one could wish. Stirring oratory 
is not that in which every sentence has a hectic 
flush. 

But apart from mere ignorance of the art, a 
reason for the failure of our present debaters 
may be their distrust of the public. The public 
is not thought worthy of being talked to sensibly. 
There is a mortal terror of giving one's case 
away. A truth must be swaddled with overstate- 
ments when it walks abroad. You will find plenty 
of men who will talk more reasonably in private 
67 



THE CROWDED FORUM 

than they would think of doing for the press or 
platform. Intelligent men do not as a rule as- 
sume, in talking with us privately, that all wis- 
dom and all virtue are with them. They 
agree with us in some points, and they try to 
understand our point of view. But in addressing 
us collectively they will show the most shocking 
cynicism as to what we can understand. They 
prejudge us as altogether foolish, and talk to 
us accordingly. Many a thought will be held 
back because it is supposed to be too big for us. 
Yet, when has the public ever been hurt by 
breadth of view, and who ever delivered a signifi- 
cant message when he was tortured every minute 
by the dread of being misunderstood ? The truth 
is, the public can stand from any man the best 
there is in him. No man ever made a deep im- 
pression who tried to do all his thinking in 
majorities. Our current controversies are for 
this reason needlessly dull. One cannot suppress 
the fanatic. He will be on hand to do his worst 
for every cause. But it is possible to take a 
kindlier view of popular intelligence and to aim 
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a little higher in one's style of arguments. For 
after all, the good debater, like the good work- 
man in any other art, finds when he has made his 
masterpiece, that he has made his public, too. 



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VI 

ASPERITIES OF PEACEMAKING 

Is IT because we are jingoes that we are so 
little stirred by the sort of things certain earnest 
writers are saying against war? That is what 
they would maintain. Goldwin Smith has been 
attacking the idea that a nation can cure itself 
of its vices by going to war with another nation. 
Tolstoi's well-known views have appeared in an 
English translation, and several other eminent 
writers have recently denounced war at some 
length. It has also become what is known as a 
"timely topic," which means that almost any- 
thing any one chooses to say about it finds its 
way into print. So it happens that many grown- 
up persons have published compositions on the 
relative merits of love and hate and the impro- 
priety of bloodshed. With Tolstoi it is only a 
part of a pretty comprehensive gospel. He 
would turn us all at once into something pure and 
primitive and sweet, and, as regards art 
matters, into something exceedingly stupid, 
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getting rid of certain intellectual vices 
by abolishing intellect altogether, it would 
seem. But there is a holy flame in the 
old man, and he is really beyond us, and not at 
all to blame if we never catch up, and it is a pity 
if literature is to have nothing to do with the 
things that are not. He is an idealist through 
and through, and hates war no more than he hates 
every other curse that our sins bring down on 
us. The peace advocates of the newspapers are 
not usually of that stamp. I do not presume to 
question their motives, but the fine idealism they 
reveal on that subject does not seem to extend to 
other things. Truth, for example, is as good a 
thing as peace, and is needful even in advocating 
peace. They have steadily assumed that if you 
do not fall in with them you are an enemy to the 
cause. Does that follow? 

What is the matter with us that, in spite of a 
longing for universal peace quite as strong as 
theirs, they no sooner begin to preach than we 
hunt for arguments on the other side.^* It may 
be our weak and sinful natures. It may be some- 
71 



THE CROWDED FORUM 

thing in the way they do it. One has a right to 
consider before setting himself down as a mur- 
derous old war-dog just because he does not en- 
joy the average peace harangue. In the first 
place, they make the case too plain. It is an 
artificial and insincere simplicity, with all the 
perplexing things left out. Surely there are some 
perplexing things about man. With the reform- 
er's man it is always a naked choice between 
heaven and hell. With God's man it is different. 
Nine times out of ten the poor devil does not know 
which is which, for the good and evil have been 
jumbled together and the colors have run, and 
even when he really wants to be an angel the re- 
sults are mixed. How can you prescribe for him, 
if you do not know what he is like.? It is a bad 
philosophy that is founded on omissions. Yet the 
peace talkers expurgate history for this purpose, 
as the temperance orator expurgates science, feel- 
ing that somehow the whole truth would hurt us 
and that the way to save souls is to go sneaking 
around the facts. And they treat us all as if we 
belonged to that class of warlike rhapsodists who 
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THE CROWDED FORUM 

regard war as a sentimental tonic — quinine for 
our bad malarious morals. Not a word for those 
who are so far gone. 

"War," said the late Dean Farrar, "is a 
fraction of that Armageddon struggle described 
in the Apocalypse," and so on in a poetic strain 
very flattering to war. To which Goldwin 
Smith retorted that the dean "would touch less 
lightly on dread of the horrors of war 
as a motive for avoiding it if he had seen the 
wreck of a battlefield, the contents of a field hos- 
pital after a battle, or even the burning farms 
of the Transvaal, with the women and children 
turned adrift, as an eye-witness describes them, 
and desperately trying to rescue something from 
their homes." So he would, no doubt, and his 
present language is quite absurd; but the peace 
enthusiast would "touch less lightly" on the dif- 
ficulties of keeping out of war if he took more 
pains to know men as they are. It would be 
easy enough to put the world to rights if there 
were so little in it. Preaching against blood- 
thirstiness in general does not seem to fit when 
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THE CROWDED FORUM 

you are tormented by the circumstances of some 
particular case, and wondering if war is the 
worse alternative. But the average reformer will 
have nothing to do with circumstance. He 
snubs it, acts as if he had never met it; if he 
"disapproves of Asia, Asia is no more." 

More of us are with the peace people in their 
premises than they seem to think. We do not 
enjoy butchery, and are not gloating over Fili- 
pino bones or South African ashes. Theirs is not 
a voice crying in the wilderness. On the ele- 
ments of morals we are agreed, and we dare go 
as far as the South Carolina poet : 

The man who thinks God is too iind 

To punish actions vile, 
Is bad at heart, of unsound mind. 

Or very juvenile. 

Only, one does not feel like saying it very 
often, because it seems as if people must know. 
But we are with them at heart — these sparrows 
on the housetops — and they must make room for 
us by their side. It is foolish to go on living like 
a moral hermit when there is no need of it. But 
perhaps they enjoy it, and we may be de trop. 
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THE CROWDED FORUM 

The chief ob j ection is to the method employed. 
If the world is already so bad, what is the use of 
keeping it? If this country is hopelessly cor- 
rupt and democracy a failure, and conscience 
dried up, and commercialism rampant, and virtue 
all gone, why not leave us to go to our own place, 
like Judas? And what better route is there than 
war? The truth is, when a man begins to 
prophesy ruin because his country goes to war, 
he is apt before long, particularly if he is a little 
undersized, to pray for what he prophesies, just 
to punish the country and bring her to her senses 
— and vindicate him. And he counts up his dead 
compatriots with an enthusiasm that is not ex- 
actly pious, and he accepts defeat with a com- 
placency that is not merely altruistic, and almost 
any degree of patriotism strikes him as exces- 
sive, and any kind of national rejoicing as vul- 
gar. One may see this in him and still be peace- 
loving, and one may dislike it without being a 
war-dog. It often happens that what a man of 
this type sets down as lust for blood on your part 
is after all only a harmless hankering for com- 
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mon sense. It is a bad way to grow old. The 
memoirs of old men are so often full of it — the 
world winding up in darkness because their light 
fails. If we discount it a little now and then, it 
does not follow that we are cutthroats or even 
lukewarm in the interests of peace. 



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VII 

MEASURING AN AMERICAN REPUTATION 

Some years ago an enterprising American col- 
lege president conceived the notion of a Hall of 
Fame for great Americans, with a hundred 
judges to decide who should be glorified. Where- 
upon a serious-minded writer declared that to 
decide the question of fame by the majority vote 
of a hundred wise men was in some sort impious, 
because it left "the divine will out of the matter 
altogether." When people are enjoying them- 
selves someone with a swollen conscience is sure 
to come along and complain about it. As if we 
were going to make Providence feel de trop by 
guessing about our great men. It is as good a 
game of chance as was ever thought of. It re- 
quires skill and knowledge and some searching of 
the heart, and the subject matter is intensely in- 
teresting. The results are surprising to the 
judges themselves and to everybody else. Every 
group of a hundred men, wise or foolish, would 
decide differently, and the same group would 
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THE CROWDED FORUM 

change its mind in a month if its members were 
ordinarily progressive. For the longer you think 
and the further you read, the more reputations 
you discover, and some of the new are sure to 
crowd out the old ones. George Washington 
and a few others are fixtures, but the lesser names 
go in and out of your mind constantly, and how 
many you can find there and who they are will 
depend on what time of day it is. As to names 
like Elias Howe, your memory merely flirts with 
them. You have found twenty-nine great men 
and must have one more. William Morris Hunt 
is in, and so is Gilbert Stuart. Poe will not do, 
because he drank, and, besides, poetry is well 
enough represented as it is. Soldiers are not in 
your line, and they should be kept down anyhow 
for fear of militarism. A useful person is needed 
— an inventor. A sewing machine buzzes in the 
next room, and Elias Howe comes to mind, and 
you take him. There is a broad zone of indif- 
ference where you are lucky if you can find even 
a whim. In this haphazard region the best and 
wisest of men is no better than a mob. 
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THE CROWDED FORUM 

What is the unit of measure — the foot-pound, 
ohm, volt or square milhmeter of glory? Take 
one of the simpler problems. Here are Hunt, 
Howe, Stuart and Poe waiting to be graded. 
First find the common denominator of ? sewing 
machine and the Lenox Lyceum. This will en- 
able you to compare the inventive genius of Howe 
with Hunt's skill as an architect. Then see how 
many times the answer will go into Poe's Raven 
and Stuart's paintings of the presidents. Sub- 
tract five from Poe because he was so dissipated. 
Add two to Howe because, though he was reduced 
for years to driving an engine, he never took to 
drink. Be honest with yourself, but bear in mind 
that you alone cannot make a reputation. You 
must consider the point of view of other men and 
also of the angels. If you have no preference 
yourself, find one and take its measure. Do not 
forget that you are to decide not merely where 
glory is, but where it ought to be. When you 
have made up your mind do not touch it, but 
treat an opinion as if you had married it. Find 
out what you yourself think, what you think 
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THE CROWDED FORUM 

other people are thinking, how the thing is looked 
at in heaven, and what sort of an influence it 
may have on the young. Out of it all must come 
a decision fit to be carved on imperishable stone. 
It is matter for flashlights and bulletins. But 
we do not commemorate our dead in that man- 
ner. To correspond with actual conditions there 
should be a thousand halls of fame, and in each 
one a biographical dictionary on a whirligig. 
It would not do to have the same biographical 
dictionary. Reputations go up and down like 
stocks, whether men have been ten years dead or 
fifty. Yet if you come out with a list of your 
forty favorites caught on the fly you are charged 
with departing from absolute truth. There has 
never yet been a biographical compendium whose 
editor has not been blamed for leaving out names 
far more important than those he put in. Never- 
theless it will be a bad thing for the honored 
dead if the time ever comes when we agree about 
them. Settle once and for all their order of 
merit and hundreds would never be heard of. 
Now, there is Elias Howe, who has at last got 
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THE CROWDED FORUM 

what he deserved — a decent talking about. It is 
queer material for carving on stone, but no 
queerer than much that we put there. There are 
signs that the city of New York can be pretty 
frivolous even in bronze. The discussion is the 
main thing. Gossip responds to a human need, 
and gossip about dead men cannot hurt them. 
It clearly shows the stuff that reputations below 
a certain grade are made of. Many of the 
smaller glories owe their longevity to the lazy- 
mindedness of the survivors, for who can afford 
to be painstaking about such trifles .? 

How tell which is the greater of two men when 
neither is great at all.? The best way is to shut 
your eyes and guess at it. If it were James K. 
Polk and Julius Caesar it would be one thing. 
But it is James K. Polk and E. P. Roe, and 
Hunt, and Howe, and Dolly Madison. Guess, 
and think no more about it. If you were the 
editor of a biographical dictionary, part of the 
work would consist in this very thing. Some one 
would write in and complain that half a page was 
given to Jones and Brown was left out alto- 
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THE CROWDED FORUM 

gether. Yet if you aim at the Jones point of 
thoroughness you should logically include not 
only Brown, but a hundred others. The grave- 
yards are choked with men of the Jones degree. 
It is no doubt true. But what is the harm in 
guessing Jones? Oblivion will get them all in 
the long run; the final marks will not be ready 
till the day of judgment, and in the meanwhile 
why should we not discuss our taste in dead men ? 



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VIII 

DEMOCRATIC GENTILITY 

A PRETTY row is sure to follow any public refer- 
ence to good breeding, especially to an alleged 
criterion or condition precedent of good breed- 
ing. An Anglo-Saxon community cannot stand 
it. Once, when an eminent naval officer opposed 
the promotion of warrant officers on the ground 
that they lacked social qualifications, a United 
States senator all aglow with the spirit of Jean 
Jacques and Robert Burns and the Declaration 
called him a "snob" and a "coward" and a "con- 
ceited ass." I am not now concerned with the 
merits of the case, but only with the heat of the 
language. There are terrible passions in this 
field, and they lie very near the surface. 

In England it is about the same, or possibly 
worse. A few years ago the best behaved of 
British weeklies quoted with approval in one of 
its book reviews the remark that a gentleman was 
a "man who played the game;" that is to say, 
fitted in well with the company he was thrown 
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THE CROWDED FORUM 

with, did not cheat or interfere or insist on play- 
ing his own game or the wrong game at the 
wrong time. That set things going. Gentle- 
men who felt that this left them out wanted an- 
other definition. Correspondents squabbled with 
one another and with the editor, and exchanged 
volleys of quotations from the dictionary and 
the Bible and the Elizabethan poets and the 
Herald's College. Some said it all depended on 
the great-grandfather's occupation, which, of 
course, shocked the great-grandfatherless and 
brought out in rebuttal a host of proverbs on the 
order of "handsome is as handsome does." The 
writers sometimes reinforced their arguments by 
giving their addresses at highly respectable 
clubs, and one of them crushed his adversary by 
sheer weight of personal dignity. "Being my- 
self in business," he said, "albeit a descendant of 
the princes of Wales of the old race as well as a 
descendant of that more modern stock, the Nor- 
man and Plantagenet kings and their alliances, 
I feel Mr. C.'s definition as a species of insult; 
but, thank the gods ! the term 'gentleman' is de- 
84* 



THE CROWDED FORUM 

rived rather from a man's conduct toward others 
than from any fictitious virtue of ancestry." 

The real cause of these disturbances is the 
odious nature of the facts themselves. One side 
says that there are such things as social dis- 
tinctions; the other side, which is always the 
more numerous, says that such distinctions are 
wrong, and it does not want to have them men- 
tioned. The champion of the "plain people" in- 
variably has the advantage. He knows that the 
plain people have a rooted aversion to plain 
truths, and that each branch of our race has one 
social code for private use and another for public 
exhibition. You will never catch him in the in- 
discretion of a public allusion to social qualifi- 
cations, though in private he may grade men ac- 
cording to the kind of cuffs they wear or snub 
the pure in heart merely because they chew 
tobacco. Everybody knows that manners, fam- 
ily, habits, clothes and like irrelevancies down to 
the smallest details of toothpick and napkin man- 
agement are the chief bonds or barriers between 
men and between nations ; that snobbery in one 
85 



I 



THE CROWDED FORUM 

form or another is eternal and omnipotent, and 
bigger than humanity itself. Not a herd of 
cattle without its "consciousness of kind," which 
implies a certain social hauteur toward every 
other kind. But it is not a subject to go before 
the crowd with. It is a principle on which we 
shape our whole lives, but when we speak above 
a whisper let us only say : "A man's a man for a' 
that." The crowd would rather be ill-served 
than admit for a moment that a man could be 
socially disqualified for his job, no matter what 
his job might be. 

Once in a while we hear grumblings from 
abroad about the characters of our diplomatic 
representatives. Some one has said that many of 
them in the past had been "socially impossible." 
This may be absolutely untrue, but the point is 
that if it were clearly shown that American rep- 
resentatives were so regarded and that as a result 
the service suffered, we should make no open at- 
tempt to mend matters. A lesson might be 
learned and changes might be made from behind 
the scenes, but of one thing we are positive : An 
86 



THE CROWDED FORUM 

American statesman would rise sublimely on the 
floor of the Senate in the full view of the plain 
people and say that if a good American was not 
good enough for a European power that power 
was a "snob," "coward" and "conceited ass," or 
words to that effect. 



87 



PART III 

THE FRIGHTENED 
MINORITY 



SETTING THE PACE 

A FEARLESS preacher once reproved the Newport 
gentry for their worldly ways, and the subject 
was solemnly discussed in the newspapers for 
two solid weeks. It was a sort of court sermon. 
Though uncompromising toward sin, he did not 
for a minute forget the social position of the sin- 
ners. In fact, the size of the sin seemed to be in 
proportion to the importance of that social posi- 
tion, so there was no doubt a sweet side to the sor- 
row at the bigness of it. A rebuke like that is 
always reassuring to an aristocracy that is a little 
new at the business and, therefore, a little doubt- 
88 



THE FRIGHTENED MINORITY 

f ul of itself. The eyes of fifty million American 
citizens are upon you, so take care what you do, 
said he. It is a hard heart that this would not 
touch. And there is no class of people in the 
world that needs such recognition more than this 
aristocracy of ours, and they were grateful even 
for this polite untruth. The most discourag- 
ing thing about our fashionable society is that 
so few people know of it. If there were only a 
bigger crowd peering over the railing it would 
be more fun to be inside. Where is the good of 
being exclusive when so few realize that they are 
shut out.? It takes something of a specialist to 
keep track even of their names. There is a fringe 
of socially ambitious people who know, and there 
are sporadic cases of an abnormal kind of interest 
in dry society data on the part of persons who 
have never met any of the participants and do 
not expect to meet them. But except for a half 
dozen or so of egregious persons, and these egre- 
gious mainly by their wealth, the names of our 
local leaders of fashion are to the average man 
as the names of Hindoo gods. 



THE FRIGHTENED MINORITY 

We have no loyal peasantry or deferential 
tradespeople or awestruck middle class. There 
is no common standard of fashionable values. 
Social distinctions assume a hundred thousand 
forms. There are about as many peerages as 
there are men. What is a leader of a cotillon to 
the average citizen compared to the Royal Arch. 
Something of his particular lodge? And there 
are mighty honors almost within his reach. May 
he not hope some day to be the Supreme Secre- 
tary of his order of the Hidden Sanctuary, and 
wear twelve badges and a red fez ? The cards of 
invitation which our young Pendennis sticks in 
his looking glass do not even dazzle his landlady. 
Social triumphs are too esoteric over here. In 
general our dollared gentry are envied only for 
their dollars. Specialists in fashionable matters 
assume a range of information that does not exist. 
The details of the society columns are cabalistic 
to all but a few, and the good or bad effects of 
what is technically called fashionable example 
may not reach across the street. And yet there 
is always some one watching nervously to see if 
90 



THE FRIGHTENED MINORITY 

they drink more than they used to or play for 
higher stakes, or if the women are taking to cock- 
tails or smoking cigarettes. If they find out 
anything they pass the word along, and straight- 
way a flurried moralist will ask if there is any 
virtue left among our leisure classes. "Wealth 
and luxury have changed greatly the atmosphere 
of American life." We are all in immediate dan- 
ger of divorcing our wives and floating sinward 
on a flood of dry champagne. 

By the cockfights of our ancestors I protest 
against the doctrine that such things are new. 
What past date have these people in mind? Was 
it when England's greatest jurist said an occa- 
sional booze expanded the emotions and mellowed 
the manners of her growing youth? Or was it 
when the leading statesmen of the century lived 
their whole lives out without getting even with 
their gambling debts? This among a class of 
people that might well have set the pace. Be- 
labor us as much as you like, but why let our 
forefathers off so easily? Making demi-gods of 
forefathers is an old practice. You would sup- 
91 



THE FRIGHTENED MINORITY 

pose that people who wished to prove us worse 
than they would be at some pains to show us what 
manner of folk they were. As a rule they skip 
all that. They pass over our forefathers with 
gentle generalities. With us they are terribly 
concrete. There is no fair basis of comparison. 
They talk of forefathers as if they were a first 
wife. The second wife may be just as good, but 
she happens to be on hand. That is the trouble 
with us. We are blamed just because we are not 
dead. 

It is not fair to compare the eighteenth cen- 
tury as seen in Henry Esmond with the twentieth 
century as seen on Fourteenth Street. Some- 
thing should be allowed for stained-glass effects. 
We have chosen to fit up the past as a playroom 
for our imaginations. We arrange it pictu- 
resquely and throw out the things we do not like. 
It is a good place for a rainy day, but how about 
spending our whole lives in it? Ruffs and pow- 
dered periwigs and very low bows, even profanity 
delighting by the quaintness of it — no better 
place for an aristocratic outlook on this mean 
92 



THE FRIGHTENED MINORITY 

generation. But the sponging house and the 
eternal drunkenness and the mean servility of 
dependent classes, and the polite breakfast on the 
occasion of the hanging, and the omnipresent 
illiteracy — why not mention these things and 
others, if only to show that the real eighteenth 
century is what you have in mind? As the world 
moves along there are a lot of people in every 
generation who are sorry they came. They are 
instinctive partisans of any kind of forefather. 

But to return to our fashionable exemplars. 
The truth of the matter is there is no social circle 
that could stand the scrutiny that is brought to 
bear upon what society reporters call the elite. 
There are scandals in Cornville just as bad. Peo- 
ple write of our fashionable society with a lot of 
Ouidaesque notions at the back of their heads. 
Cynical, worldly, epigrammatic and blase — 
where are all those characters of Mrs. Burton 
Harrison and the others who have followed her in 
a troop ? Whatever our aristocracy may be, it is 
not effete. The novelty of external things has 
not worn off. In point of simplicity it compares 



THE FRIGHTENED MINORITY 

well with any other class, for simplicity is not a 
matter of cost. Some very expensive pleasures 
may be almost heartrending in their simplicity. 
A complex person would soon go mad, and there 
is nothing in them even for a corrupt heart. But 
people do not like to write of it as it is (even 
when they know) for fear of being dull. 

There has grown up a fiction about the morals 
of this class and about the force of its example. 
We are badly in need of some one who will em- 
phasize the unromantic truth. The thing that is 
ground into a candid mind, making its observa- 
tions at first hand, is that the morals of those peo- 
ple are by no means their weakest spot. Like 
most classes of men and women, they are not so 
bad as they are painted, and a good deal stupider. 
And as to the example, he will have discovered 
this : He may travel fifty miles up and down and 
across Manhattan Island without meeting a sin- 
gle person who knows what that example is. 



94 



THE FRIGHTENED MINORITY 

II 

THE WALK UPTOWN 

Shall we New Yorkers be damned in the next 
world if we pause one instant in our warfare with 
municipal iniquity and take in the view? Is it 
the sin of Lot's wife for us ever to look around? 
Surely it is pardonable sometimes to take a vaca- 
tion from reform and to be frankly pleased with 
things that are morally indifferent. Corruption 
will not get away. You will find it waiting to be 
belabored at the same old place when you come 
back. One ought not to be bruising the serpent 
all the time. The most vivacious snake-bruiser 
sometimes needs a rest. He works the better for 
it. Some say New Yorkers with the moral aim 
take too much rest. It is not true. Their hearts 
are always throbbing with political wrath. Cor- 
ruption is their constant daily thought. They do 
not act, it is true, but they think and they talk 
and they expose without a pause. They never 
give their city a good word. That is their atone- 
ment for their ineffectiveness. That much they 
95 



THE FRIGHTENED MINORITY 

are willing to do for reform's sake. They can 
at least abuse. 

There is no queerer thing in the world than a 
good New Yorker's conscience. How would he 
define his city? As the cheerfullest, hopefullest, 
most vitalizing big spot in a hemisphere or two, 
which it is in spite of everything.'^ He would like 
to, but civic duty will not let him. Conscience re- 
quires that he shall define it as a long, narrow and 
very corrupt strip of land provided with insuffi- 
cient facilities for rapid transit, and once the 
home of the Tweed ring ; bounded on the east by 
a river over which a set of rascals are planning to 
build a bridge when what is needed is a tunnel, and 
on the west by a line of viciously administered 
docks ; on the south lies New York bay opening 
widely to let in the scum of foreign races and 
Richard Croker when he returns from Europe. 
Conscience insists on accuracy of definition and 
on infinity of talk, but on not much more, 
as is shown on election day. A man must 
swell with rage over municipal corruption 
day and night, but it is quite proper for 
96 



THE FRIGHTENED MINORITY 

him to dodge jury duty and to stay away from 
primaries. 

The moral indignation is a good thing, since 
in time it may lead to action, but there is no rea- 
son why it should monopolize the soul and be- 
numb all the faculties. You can fight evil with- 
out snubbing all the good things in life, and 
there are some of these good things in New York. 
Is it the part of a reactionary to say so.'' The 
New York of the better class of newspapers and 
of the conversation of its most loyal citizens is 
about the blackest place under the sun. The old 
lady who went through St. Louis with a rope tied 
around her and her six children lest the wicked 
should grab them would not venture New York 
in an armored train. It is not that the press says 
a word too much about our vices, but it never says 
anything about the other things. Yet who has 
ever been hurt by seeing more than one side of the 
truth? Can't a man work for improvement with- 
out being lopsided or wearing blinders? One 
would think that for a New Yorker to speak up 
for his city was to pitch his tent toward Tam- 
97 



THE FRIGHTENED MINORITY 

many or Sodom, and that the only way to cure 
evil was to acknowledge no good. 

It does not look much like Sodom as you walk 
uptown. There are street corners where the sin 
of a little cheerfulness is almost pardonable. 
Lexow and Mazet revelations and Ramapo and 
Croker would all roll off the mind for the mo- 
ment if you would let them. At the risk of moral 
laxity I say this does no harm. It is not likely 
the devil could do much in the few minutes you 
were off guard. It is legitimate sometimes to 
look down a side street straight to the sunset at 
the other end without counting the number of 
gin-mills to the block. Do not confound material 
well-being with political health, as Mr. Godkin 
justly warned. But the sky is not upholstered 
with ward politics, and Tammany Hall is not yet 
a sign of the zodiac. 



98 



THE FRIGHTENED MINORITY 

III 

THE READING PUBLIC 

As THE autumn freshet of books comes down 
upon us the usual discussion of their superfluity 
promptly recurs. One writer says this century 
will be known as the century that was always 
reading about itself, and taunts the present gen- 
eration with even putting the letters of the alpha- 
bet in their soup. Another lectures the whole 
tribe of publishers for giving the public what 
they want instead of what in the opinion of the 
lecturer they ought to have, and somebody else 
lectures him for not suggesting the proper rem- 
edy. And so it goes until there is a huge pile of 
printed matter all to the effect that printed mat- 
ter is in excess. The present century may be 
known as the one that became panic-stricken at 
the sight of its own abundance. 

When you come to think of it, there is no more 

reason why we should excite ourselves over the 

superabundance of printed words than over the 

increase in the amount of conversation. Inven- 

99 

l.ofC 



THE FRIGHTENED MINORITY 

tions have enabled us to print a part of that 
which used to be spoken and which perished in 
the saying. We have always heard that talk was 
cheap, and printed matter has become almost as 
inexpensive. Because we read a good deal of our 
talk now and throw it afterward in the waste 
basket, it does not follow that we are intellectu- 
ally going to the dogs. The superfluous book is 
sometimes annoying, but so is the superfluous 
man. Every improvement in communication 
makes the bore more terrible. Nowadays he can 
get himself published as easily as at one time 
he could get himself invited out to dinner. So 
you meet him more frequently in print. But you 
meet everybody and everything more frequently 
in print. It is rather absurd to quarrel with 
print on that account or to blame the publishers 
exclusively. The more food there is in the world 
the more fools will be fed. It is not the fault of 
the food or the food producers. 

When a dull book meets with great suc- 
cess some one always has a fling at the pub- 
lishers. Of course, it would be better if 
100 



THE FRIGHTENED MINORITY 

they maintained a high standard. But they 
are no more to be blamed than you or 
I for taking the world as they find it. And what 
would the dull man be doing if he were not por- 
ing over the dull page ? Would he be drinking in 
some brilliant table talk, or studying art, or read- 
ing the Elizabethan dramatists? There is noth- 
ing in what we know of the dull man's daily life 
to make us think that he has been tempted to his 
ruin. Before dull books were printed dull men 
were probably duller yet. They may keep him 
from reading the average book, but he would 
then be doing some other thing equally average. 
Averageness is a quality we must put up with. 
And, after all, why is a poor, tawdry piece of 
writing so much worse than cheap chromos or 
crude, gaudy ornaments, or the thousand and 
one other things that machinery multiplies as 
we all travel up from barbarism? Men march 
toward civilization in column formation, and by 
the time the van has learned to admire the mas- 
ters the rear is drawing reluctantly away from 
the totem pole. Anywhere in the middle you may 
101 



THE FRIGHTENED MINORITY 

find a veneration for China pug dogs or an en- 
thusiasm for Marie Corelli — still an advance. 
Literary people seem to think that every time a 
volume of Hall Caine is sold Shakespeare is to 
that extent neglected. It merely means that 
some semi-savage has reached the Hall Cainc 
stage, and we should wish him godspeed on his 
way to Shakespeare. It is only when a pretended 
Shakespeare man lapses into Hall-Cainery that 
one need be excited. 

As usual in these equinoctial debates, the line 
is neatly drawn between the hostile camps of the 
Scornful Few and the literary Democrats. "As 
for this vast new reading public," says one of 
our leading novelists, "it is the vast 'old reading 
public with more means in its pocket of satisfy- 
ing its crude, childish taste. Its head is the same 
empty head." Another, heart and soul with the 
party of hauteur, and a Coriolanus to the plain 
people assails the "mechanical reader," meaning 
by that the person "who makes it a rule to read," 
whose head no book can fertilize, who borrows 
his opinions of literature. "To the mechanical 
102 



THE FRIGHTENED MINORITY 

reader, books once read are not like growing 
things that strike root and intertwine branches, 
but Hke fossils ticketed and put away in the 
drawers of a geologist's cabinet; or rather, like 
prisoners condemned to life-long solitary im- 
prisonment. In such a mind books never talk to 
each other." 

On the opposing side there is the complacency^ 
of numbers and a boundless faith in the average 
American — the familiar belief that in the long 
run the people are just about right. "Healthy 
optimism," I believe, is the technical term — ^land 
of promise and the goose hangs high, warm 
hearts and paper collars, beautiful thoughts in 
frowsy heads, and what is best is also simplest, 
and "you can't fool the people all the time," and 
the throbbing pulse of common humanity, 
and the sterling worth of the man in the 
street, and the divine right of the thing that 
gets the votes, for whatever is greatest 
gets them. It seems as if never a day had 
passed without a whirl of these rousing senti- 
ments. 

103 



THE FRIGHTENED MINORITY 

Now, I too once fought (as a private of 
course) on the side of the Scornful and har- 
pooned the public with all my might, but some- 
how or other the old hippopotamus never felt it. 
I too not doubting that I was a first cabin pas- 
senger stood proudly among the few and let drive 
at mechanical readers and writers and critics and 
multitudes and blamed everybody for not being 
like somebody, and somebody for not being like 
me, and thought mediocrity would know itself 
from my description and feel ashamed and per- 
haps die, and was particularly devastating 
among fools and could have wept when they did 
not know it and took me for one of themselves. 
But the pleasure of it passes and there is never 
any profit in it to anybody. Of course people 
are a little exasperating when they talk about 
books — which seem to go through the mind for 
the most part like beans through a tube — and so 
uniform are they and so gregarious, forty feed- 
ing as one, that it seems as if Nature turned out 
men's souls as from a waffle-iron. And it is the 
more disturbing because we know Nature does 
104 



THE FRIGHTENED MINORITY 

nothing of the sort but gives them personal 
preferences in clothes and food and cigars. Each 
swears in different language at his toothache and 
takes a different woman for his wife. Pinch a 
member of the reading public and you will 
find that he is real. But his personal taste 
in books is harder to get at than his secret 
vices. 

But why need one be so bitter about it.? Be- 
cause a reader is inarticulate and cannot prove 
that green things with twining branches grow 
in his fertilized head, it does not follow that he 
is mechanical. And suppose he is mechanical 
and bears the needless burden of other people's 
tastes and potters away at self-improvement 
when he has nothing to improve, there is nothing 
in it so very dreadful. Literary people are for- 
ever judging the quality of the mind by the turn 
of expression. Such sniffs at the banal remark 
and the empty sentence, such holy wrath at un- 
productive reading; the minute a poor wretch 
swallows an epic they look at his tongue for a 
sign. They expect things of people as readers 
105 



THE FRIGHTENED MINORITY 

that they do not expect of them as men. To 
most men the platitude is as natural as the bark 
to a dog, and if feeling were measured by elo- 
quence there would be no family ties. The dull 
man is not only entitled to his dull book but is 
privileged to talk of masterpieces in his dull way, 
and there is no more reason for railing at him in 
his relation to books than in his relation to his 
government, and his God, and his green grocer, 
and his friends, whom perhaps he bores most 
frightfully, and who therefore have a greater 
grievance than true literature can complain of. 
Taking people as they are, considering whom 
they marry, and what they eat and how they live 
and what they say and how they say it, we must 
in common sense conclude that their literary taste 
is the least thing that is the matter with them. 
But literary-mindedness sees only the one thing ; 
it would reduce the universe to a coterie, control 
the birthrate of this sphere and breed only 
Browning-readers. The question is not literary 
but biological. It is not a humane view of us 
ex-barbarians. Give us time, and meanwhile 
106 



THE FRIGHTENED MINORITY 

thank Heaven that for the present we are at 
least tailless. 

It is one side of a larger problem, which is 
rather complex. Another part of it is preying 
on the vitals of the political economists, and over 
still another an enthusiastic group of sociolog- 
ists are rapidly growing mad. If we could tell 
what the millions ought to have we should be in 
a fair way to settle the world's future offhand. 
Nor is there any hope of a general reaction. The 
society of the future is sure to be more tempted 
and embarrassed by the multude of its opportun- 
ities than we are now. 

Critics seem often ill at ease in the bad com- 
pany of this every-day world. They find no 
pleasure in what is merely crude and laughable 
and have only harsh words for a stage of develop- 
ment. You might as well lampoon a hemisphere. 
They do not sneer at children with their primers, 
but for the average man with the average book 
they have no mercy. Their real grievance is 
with the number of people there are in the world, 
but for my part I believe that were it not for the 
107 



THE FRIGHTENED MINORITY 

presence of the unwashed and the half -educated, 
the formless, queer and incomplete, the un- 
reasonable and absurd, the infinite shapes of the 
delightful human tadpole, the horizon would not 
wear so broad a grin. 



108 



THE FRIGHTENED MINORITY 

IV 

REFORMERS AND BROOMSTICKS 

A FEW years ago a number of our protectors in 
the press were greatly alarmed by reports of 
brutal hazing at West Point. Cadets had been 
made to stand upon their heads, sing songs, ride 
on broomsticks, and eat tabasco sauce. Congress 
appointed a committee of inquiry, and finding 
the reports in part true very properly took steps 
to improve the discipline, which happy consum- 
mation would in all likelihood have come about 
had our moral guardians scared us less. For 
after all nothing very horrible was disclosed by 
the inquiry. If those cadets deserve pity, we do, 
too. Most of us have eaten worse things than 
tabasco sauce. There was, for example, a cer- 
tain compound of vinegar and wheel grease which 
— but that is a fraternal secret. Though not 
trained for warriors, we, too, have eaten soap. 
Some of us may not have stood on our heads in 
bath tubs — bath tubs are not always convenient 
at the time — but we know from experience of the 
109 



THE FRIGHTENED MINORITY 

higher education that pretty effective things can 
be done with a pump. And there was a long, 
hard board in the hands of a strong man — ^hard- 
est board, strongest man we have ever known — 
which must have been as well adapted to its pur- 
pose as anything they had at West Point. 
Brutal? We thought so then, decidedly. "In- 
human man, curse on thy barbarous art, and 
blasted be thy murder-aiming eye." That was 
the thought that struck us when the board did. 
It was not the way young Emerson was treated. 
The other boys seemed to know by instinct that 
he was going to be a great thinker when he grew 
up. Of heroes, statesmen and philosophers there 
are a plenty who never passed through any such 
ordeal in youth. It was clear to us even then 
that man may be great without it. On the other 
hand, there have been many cases of serious and 
lasting damage done to beings of a fine but 
fragile mould. Our tormentors, therefore, ran 
a great risk. In banging us around they might 
have thumped out a strain of real poetry in us 
or spoiled us for the ambassadorship at St. James. 
110 



THE FRIGHTENED MINORITY 

But did they? Ask our guardian angels. We 
only know — and there are some millions of us 
survivors — that if this blessed land has lost a few 
frail poets in the process, it has been saved from 
a far greater number of prigs. Few men who 
have been through it will tell you it is altogether 
bad. 

This does not argue any indifference toward 
the extreme forms of hazing. Nor does any 
rational veteran feel that all the hardships of his 
own experience are strictly necessary to those 
who come later to the test. You can teach man- 
ners without taking the skin off. To be keel- 
hauled like the young man in Snarleyow is not 
the only cure for conceit. But the standard in 
the matter is not an old man's standard. Nor 
is it a standard of little French boys with their 
governesses, or of flabby, contemplative Ger- 
man youths. We fogies who write for the papers 
may as well remember that. Each generation of 
Anglo-Saxons is in an absurd hurry to stretch 
itself on the rack of this tough world. They must 
be at self-government from the very start. They 
111 



THE FRIGHTENED MINORITY 

constitute vigilance committees on the frontiers 
of life to apply lynch law to vices in the germ. 
It is not thorough, for see what slips through; 
and it is not just in a nice, respectable sense, but 
it is not altogether bad for the race, and prob- 
ably saves more souls than it damns. 

And if it is sometimes carried to excess it is 
still oftener withheld by lack of early advantages 
from the people who need it most — the men who 
cannot take a joke, who must be shielded from 
reality and double-barred against plain speech. 
To criticize is to wound; to laugh is to make 
enemies for life. So you must tiptoe as in a 
sick room lest some small vanity may take alarm. 
Meeting them now, we are too late. Middle age 
is the conventional garden where the little pom- 
posities are allowed to bloom. Youth is the time 
for weeding out the little pomposities so that they 
will not grow again. Caught then and badgered 
and guyed and "roasted," something might have 
been done, and with little risk of a broken spirit, 
for most of us start with a large enough stock 
of egotism to last through the seige. The 
112 



THE FRIGHTENED MINORITY 

time comes soon enough when people have to 
keep then' hands off and sneer behind our backs. 
There should be a season consecrated to the frank 
and primitive method. Otherwise we might grow 
up to scratch and bite like French deputies or 
pull hair like respectable members of the Aus- 
trian reichstag in their middle age. 

It seems that the committee did not take all 
the goings on at West Point with equal serious- 
ness, as the newspapers did. The report admits 
that "Many of the things done by the upper 
classmen were boyish pranks." At the same time, 
in view of the consternation this might cause our 
nursery governesses, it went on to say that even 
these boyish pranks "are frequently conducted 
in such a way as to outrage the noblest feelings 
of the human heart," and cited as an instance the 
fact that the son of a distinguished soldier had 
been compelled to ride a broomstick up and down 
the company street. It was determined to pre- 
vent the repetition of these indignities. 

So far so good; but the spirit that prompted 
the broomstick atrocity is likely to persist, and 
113 



THE FRIGHTENED MINORITY 

without laying a hand on this young gentleman 
they might have made him just as miserable. 
That is where the power of the state breaks 
down. Nothing can save our self-esteem from a 
coat of tar and feathers, and it gets it frequently. 
Noble feelings have been outraged even in Con- 
gress. One legislator has been known to imply 
that another did not speak the truth. Yet a be- 
lief that he is not a liar is one of the noblest feel- 
ings in the breast of a Congressman. He would 
as lief ride a broomstick as be robbed of it. As 
a matter of fact, the conditions of this boisterous 
planet are hopelessly unfit for any soul that could 
not stand the equivalent of that broomstick test 
in the days of his lusty youth. If Congress could 
only hedge him in completely, what a blessed 
little bijou of a man he would grow up to be. 

But Congress will not hedge him in. Both the 
committee and the cadets acted with good sense 
and brought the affair to a reasonable ending. 
The moral of it has nothing to do with either of 
these but with us outsiders. How we take on 
about such matters, we the professional croakers, 
114 



THE FRIGHTENED MINORITY 

who have but one note in our register, the same 
old solemn bull-frog note for everything that 
happens. When things are really very bad what 
shall we have to say to them? 

Our language is rich enough in disapproving 
adjectives, and it is a pity to use the same set for 
crimes and trifles. Yet in the apoplexy of our 
discontent we waste the fiercest of them on some 
assassin with a crooked pin or tyrant with a 
broomstick. A case for discipline; young men 
had broken the rules of an institution and fought 
and badgered one another and immediately there 
arose a chorus of Did you evers, and a wagging 
of fungus heads all over the country. A small 
but very serious group argued in favor of it, 
holding that it was part of a scientific plan for 
the making of officers and gentlemen. Precisely 
that degree of scuffling and violation of rules was 
necessary to develop true courage. The rest of 
us saw in it the impending smash-up of young 
manhood, and for weeks there was a pest of great 
moral owls, worse than a plague of Egypt. 

Whether or not a moral can be drawn depends 
115 



THE FRIGHTENED MINORITY 

wholly on the drawer. It is like the rabbit in the 
juggler's hat. Smoking hot shapes from Tar- 
tarus were ramping about this country wherever 
we looked. That West Point affair was not, as 
you might think, a mere instance of stupid horse- 
play, calling, perhaps, for the prompt expulsion 
of the offenders. It was a sign of the times, and 
a devil's footprint, and it showed how the curse 
of an unrighteous federal policy has tainted 
everything. Corrupt the morality at the centre, 
and this is what you get. Pollute the flag in the 
Philippines, and our sons shall constrain their 
schoolmates to ride the contumelious broomstick. 
And the end of it was just what it would have 
been if we had not lost a single night's sleep. 
Such are the blessings of a tutelary and meticu- 
lous press. But everything has its sermon, and 
the text of this is to be found not in the doings 
of the young, but in the comments of their elders. 
It is, as I take it, that if there is one thing 
worse than the savagery of youth, it is the 
pompous rigidity of middle age as exhibited in 
this discussion. 

116 



THE FRIGHTENED MINORITY 

But is it not what the people want, and might 
they not misunderstand any other course? The 
chances are that they would endure more common 
sense than we dare to give them. After all it is 
not a lachrymose people, whatever you may say. 
You can tell that from their faces and from the 
air they breathe. A fairly cheerful race, and 
not without a certain sense of a modus in rebus, 
it does not require the moral of every small event 
to be hammered in with a pile-driver. One set 
of words for the ruin of the state, another for 
the i:udeness of our children — that is what they 
expect from us, and even though we should 
be misunderstood we shall not burn for it. 



117 



PART IV 

ADVENTURES OF A PLAY- 
GOER 



ON SEEING TEN BAD PLAYS 

Had I an artist's soul I should be somewhat 
soured by what I have gone through. As it is, 
I have fought down all bitterness of heart by the 
aid of a little philosophy. A man needs philos- 
ophy more for the commonplaces of this world 
than he does for its miseries, ennui being a stead- 
ier foe than pain. I therefore offer my phi- 
losophy of the commonplace in the American 
drama and literature. It is not deep, but it is at 
least bland, and it may help to allay irritation 
in certain moods. There is enough of polished 
sarcasm, and of cynicism there is already too 
118 



ADVENTURES OF A PLAYGOER 

much. What we need is something that will aid 
us in matters of routine. 

In the first place I swear by all that is holiest 
in democracy — by the boiled onions of the plain 
people, by their even plainer wives, by the fire- 
sides of Tom, Dick and Harry, by the sanctity 
of the bigger figure, by the sacred whoops of the 
majority — ^that the usual man is not to blame for 
wanting the usual thing. Hallcainery has its 
place in the world. Indeed, I believe it alto- 
gether healthy, hopeful, and respectable, and if I 
thought otherwise I should lose all faith in repre- 
sentative institutions. There are a few who never 
weary of saying spiteful things about literary 
mediocrity. They have no patience with devel- 
opment or kindliness for beginnings ; they would 
condemn every tadpole as a sort of apostate frog. 
Why are they so petulant with majorities.? Hu- 
manity would pine away on masterpieces; yet 
many would have you think that the journey 
from savagery to high art must be made in total 
silence, with nothing to read on the way. Our 
plays are relatively good, being no further below 
119 



ADVENTURES OF A PLAYGOER 

the drama than they are above tomtoms and hu- 
man sacrifice. Blessed is vulgar "reading-mat- 
ter," for without it people might eat one another. 
No race ever sinks from Hallcainery into barbar- 
ism; it rises from barbarism to Hallcainery, 
whence in time it may emerge. 

And who shall say that our plays are not as 
good as our politics, or our writers as our Sen- 
ators? Do we expect brilliancy in our states- 
men? We are thankful enough in this country 
for a good candidate, let who will be clever. If 
a large city can, after intense intellectual ef- 
forts, choose for its mayor a man who merely will 
not steal from it, we consider it a triumph of the 
suffrage. So moderate are our expectations in 
this field that if ordinary intelligence be super- 
added, it seems a piece of luck. We are over- 
joyed at any sign that the nation's choice is up 
to the nation's average ; and time and again you 
hear a thing called statesmanlike, which in pri- 
vate life would be just on the safe side of sanity. 
Mr. McKinley's refusal of a third term was re- 
garded as a masterstroke of wisdom, and we have 
120 



ADVENTURES OF A PLAYGOER 

all read praises of Mr. Roosevelt's achievements 
which are deserved as well by anybody we ever 
knew. Nobody praises us when we come home 
sober of an evening, or speak a good average sen- 
tence, or draw a good average breath ; and sturdy 
virtues that keep us out of the police court for 
weeks at a time are not even mentioned by the 
family. But by these negative signs you can 
often tell a statesman, for politics is a place of 
humble hopes and strangely modest requirements, 
where all are good who are not criminal and all 
are wise who are not ridiculously otherwise. Any 
one who is used to the accidents of majorities 
should acquire this habit of mind. But the liter- 
ary and artistic people persist in the most exorbi- 
tant demands at a point where the least should 
be logically expected, that is, the tastes of a 
crowd. And if the majority is against them, 
they scold it and the thing it chooses, and having 
lost their tempers and tired their friends, and 
troubled a number of honest creatures who have 
not the least idea what it is all about, they feel 
that they have been doing wonders for what they 
121 



ADVENTURES OF A PLAYGOER 

call artistic standards. Right enough views, but 
the wrong occasion. We expect only peace in a 
cable car; for ectasies we must look somewhere 
else. 

If high art deserves its ecstasies, low art de- 
serves its consolations ; and if there is any way of 
making better terms with humdrum and escaping 
the spasms of reform, it is our plain business to 
find it. St. Paul said, keep the body under. I 
say unto you, keep the mind under on seeing 
American plays. Be "contentit wi' little and 
canty wi' mair;" smile though the smile looks 
sometimes like a rictus ; get the point of view of 
the original erect ape-man (pithecanthropus 
erectus) ; and if at any time you are afflicted by 
a play that is particularly bad and popular, con- 
sider the growth of our manufactures and sing 
"My Country, 'Tis of Thee." To express one's 
own tastes is reasonable, but to worry too much 
over other people's leads to a useless violence. 
Some wish to murder Hall Caine. I believe it 
would be inexpedient to do so, and possibly 
wrong. I believe Mr. Clyde Fitch as truly repre- 
122 



ADVENTURES OF A PLAYGOER 

sents New York as Senator PefFer did Kansas or 
Mr. Bryan the West ; and the more I see of 
audiences the surer I am that to massacre is the 
only way to reform. 

Unwilling to be dependent longer on the 
bounty of her rich guardian the high-spirited 
ingenue in light blue leaves her luxurious home 
to teach school in a distant village. Being very 
much of a lady she is obliged to walk as if the 
stage floor were red hot, and to speak in a high 
trilling voice with a foreign accent — a course 
that instantly wins for her the love of every one 
she meets. But the guardian comes to urge her 
to return to what, as a gentleman of wealth and 
refinement, he is obliged to call "me home." They 
are talking alone, but as soon as she begins to ex- 
plain that self-respect will not permit her to re- 
main with him, now that she knows the fortune is 
not really hers, the violins play softly and from 
every door and alley the villagers come pouring 
in. A sentimental conversation between people 
they barely know will draw villagers to the spot 
for miles around. So when the heroine and her 
123 



ADVENTURES OF A PLAYGOER 

guardian are at their saddest everybody is punc- 
tually in place. It is all very exasperating, and 
the superior person, who has no business to be 
there, will ask you if it is Art. It is not Art, but 
the stout lady in the seat behind you is nearly 
bursting with sobs, and a large number of pocket 
handkerchiefs are fluttering in the aisles. With 
this particular audience Art could do nothing at 
all. Then comes humor in its more awful forms. 
Thrice-explained humor, with long waits for the 
effects; humor accompanied by the hilarious 
roars of the man who made it. And for half an 
hour there is as genuine enjoyment as you ever 
saw, and at the very heaviest of horse-plays the 
stout lady behind you says, "Isn't that rich.?" 
Elevate the stage? Perhaps you can, but it will 
be a good many generations before those people 
will be ready for it. A quarter of an inch eleva- 
tion would spoil the whole thing for them. 

There is plenty of room for a good theatre, 
but there is no use in hoping that it will draw 
away the crowds from the class of plays that are 
now successful. These plays will continue, or 



ADVENTURES OF A PLAYGOER 

others just as bad. They are wonderfully 
adapted to the people who go to see them, and as 
time goes on this element of the population is 
bound to increase. There are more below than 
above them. It is absurd for the superior per- 
son to ask them if it is Art. He would not take 
on like that about a ball game or a merry-go- 
round. And at a country fair or sociable or 
"sugar eat" he would not be so savage about bad 
taste. But a simple, hearty New York audience 
abandoning itself to the innocent, if rude, pleas- 
ures of the average play has no mercy from him 
for the amazing reason that it is not Art. As if 
simplicity required a background of hen roosts 
and apple orchards and all primitive men tucked 
their trousers in their boots. He is a child of 
nature, the New York playgoer, even if he is not 
picturesque, and he has an honest and wholesome 
regard for whatever is atrocious in art. Put him 
on the diet of the superior person and he would 
soon starve. 

There must be bad plays. You cannot civilize 
the whole crowd of us at once, and those hideous 
125 



ADVENTURES OF A PLAYGOER 

early stages of artistic appreciation cannot be 
skipped. There is much cheerless writing on a 
subject that from certain points of view is almost 
cheerful. Compare the worst successful New 
York play with a war dance or with certain Zulu 
sports. Things have greatly improved. How 
did the same class use to amuse themselves.? As 
to moral lessons, the poorest of successful plays 
is remarkably vigorous and insistent. No sign of 
decay there. In fact, the worse the art the more 
blatant the moral. No New York playgoer is 
likely to forget for one moment that virtue is an 
admirable thing. Is it not cheerful to think of 
the big audiences going night after night to 
have the same elementary moral lessons pounded 
in.? You want your moral lesson served artistic- 
ally or you will not take it at all. Perhaps you 
would as lief see the wicked triumph for a 
change. But these people are content with vir- 
tue in the raw. They are not after new ideas, 
but want some one to say a good word for those 
they have already. On no account must you 
meddle with their minds. 
126 



ADVENTURES OF A PLAYGOER 

The moral of all this is that one ought to try 
and see the bright side of the situation, if such 
a thing is to be found, and suppress those mur- 
derous feelings toward what after all is a worthy 
class of citizens and good building material for 
the state. In spite of artistic merit and intelli- 
gence good plays may succeed, and some day 
the experiment will be tried on a large scale ; but 
in the meanwhile all the philosophy that you can 
summon and patience with those who like the 
plays they have. The undiscriminating benig- 
nity of audiences almost drives you mad. Why do 
they not rise from their places and burn and 
slay.? How easy to lynch the manager, if they 
only knew. But they are having a good time for 
all your splutter about Art, and if you can see 
any signs of demoralization in their pleasant 
moon faces you are a cynic at heart. For what- 
ever our stage is, it supplies the unseasoned food 
that is relished in the lusty infancy of Art. 



1£7 



ADVENTURES OF A PLAYGOER 

II 

THE SPAN OF THE STAGE 

Ages ago when we were all young and went to 
evening parties, there was always, it will be re- 
called, at least one blase guest who entered with 
a look of pain and remained with conscious cyni- 
cism. So the world is still at it, he seemed to 
say, as if from centuries of experience (most 
of it dark), looking more bored than mortal man 
could ever feel — as bored perhaps as Satan might 
be at an afternoon tea with cherubs. But he 
went home no earlier than any one else and had 
you at any time felt his pulse you would have 
found it pumping away as cheerfully as other 
people's. It was only that he would not confess 
his indefensible emotions. It is the same way 
with some of us playgoers. We profess to enjoy 
only as we judge, but night after night we can 
fold up our judgment like an opera hat and con- 
tentedly sit with it under the seat, though we 
damn the play with it afterwards. It is just 
this lenient play-going mood that makes stage 
128 



ADVENTURES OF A PLAYGOER 

criticism seem unreal. The intellect is detach- 
able. Sometimes you are happier if you keep 
it on ; sometimes you feel better without it ; at a 
certain kind of conventional play it is simply 
poisonous. 

I have been reading some inappropriately in- 
telligent remarks on a simple melodrama of In- 
dian fights and primitive valor, wherein the hero 
is a Western scout, a noble, athletic creature, a 
child of nature and of the Leatherstocking Tales, 
who is full of the moon and stars and the Great 
Spirit, and does not know how heroic he is when 
he saves a regiment at the risk of his life. The 
critic says the character is not life-like, as if it 
mattered, and adds that he is beneath the stand- 
ard of Broadway, as if there were one. This hero 
belongs to the juvenilia of our stage, and if you 
kill him you will find yourself embarked on a 
career of slaughter. There have been a dozen 
like him this year and last. There is no reason 
why criticism should straighten itself up with 
this sudden dignity and let the other eleven go 
through. Classify him and let him alone; enjoy 
129 



ADVENTURES OF A PLAYGOER 

the moment if you can ; forget your age and edu- 
cation and everything else; feel on the top of 
your bald head for sunny curls, and try and won- 
der how the play will turn out. Will the Indians 
get him ? It may be his gun will go off and shoot 
the orchestra. There is always something to 
wonder at. Where there's a will, there's a way. 
A play may be seen with two standards: The 
standard of what you have previously seen or 
read or studied, and the standard of what you 
would have been doing if you had stayed at home 
that evening. The average play does not com- 
pete with Shakespeare but with the evening 
papers or a game of cards or the bosom of the 
average family. 

Despise not the raw virtue, black vice and 
scalping knives of casual melodrama unless you 
are ready to despise the society hodge-podge and 
the merely spectacular historical play. The 
common defect is the unrealized men and women. 
We reverse the practice of the Elizabethans and 
label characters instead of scenery. They asked 
their audience to believe that this was a wall and 
130 



ADVENTURES OF A PLAYGOER 

that a gate-post. We do the wall and 
post to the life, but say, will you please believe 
that these jumping- jacks are human beings. 
Yet our audience is well trained, ready to take 
the will for the deed, and in no hurry to argue 
itself out of a place to spend its evenings. If 
you think coolly of the playwright's work, you 
will turn the stage into a solitude. In a month 
of play going I found only one play that met the 
tests of afterthought, but there were very few 
that did not suffice for the moment. 

We think of the theatre as a great, grinding 
machine for expressing the obvious, a show-place 
for large adventures of body and soul, unsuited 
as a bass-drum to lighter arguments. Some say 
the theatre can take nothing up till the other 
arts are through with it. Then a play like Old 
Heidelberg comes along and succeeds where 
many poets fail through sheer clumsiness. It is 
by no means a great play, and it deals with the 
lightest of themes. An unheroic young prince 
whom the restraints of a petty court hardly per- 
mit to draw a natural breath, suddenly finds him- 
131 



ADVENTURES OF A PLAYGOER 

self free to lead his own life at the university. 
For the first time he meets people on a common 
footing and can be foolish and spontaneous and 
undignified and young, and make a noise and 
fall genuinely in love with his landlord's pretty 
daughter. So he comes to life and after his first 
bewilderment does all these things with a zest that 
is good to see and resolves to keep on doing them 
for ever more, but in the midst of it all he is sum- 
moned back to the court to assume the regency. 
Being as I have said an utterly unheroic person, 
he obeys, and takes leave of his sweetheart and 
his friends in a way that makes you pity all com- 
monplace human princes. Later he revisits the 
university thinking to find everything the same, 
but he has changed and so have the students. 
Somehow no one can unbend and the meeting is 
absurdly ceremonious, empty and forlorn. Then 
the final parting with his sweetheart, for his mar- 
riage, of course, is an affair of state, and so his 
holiday ends. After all there was nothing in it 
worth losing a kingdom for. There was no 
great sorrow here, nothing tempestuous to wreck 
132 



ADVENTURES OF A PLAYGOER 

a life. His royal middle age will find it a choice 
reasonably made. But an epicure of emotion 
could probably show that the best seasoning for 
a delightful regret is a prosaic preference for 
the thing you chose. The imagination has bet- 
ter sport with what is a little beyond the range 
of real desire, and I daresay Prince Heinrich's 
grief was the most agreeable shade of the blues 
imaginable. 

So the same old stage that plays the passions 
on a steam piano can be as delicately reminiscent 
as a violin, and this playwright can make a light 
regret for outgrown things more poignant than 
D'Annunzio could the pain of an amputation. 



133 



ADVENTURES OF A PLAYGOER 

III 

ON CERTAIN **PROBLEM" PLAYS 

D'Annunzio in his English translation seems a 
monotonous and unsmiling young man of re- 
stricted interests, who, failing in the effects of 
art, falls back upon the merely horrible. With 
murder or mutilation or incest in the wind, you 
will stay on to the end, and there is never a 
moment when it is not in the wind. Portents and 
premonitions, fever fits and chills keep the doom 
incessantly impending, and the unfortunate 
characters are not human beings at all, but 
merely foregone conclusions. It fixes the atten- 
tion as surely as the gong of an ambulance. It 
is the interest of deferred brutality, the common 
device of those who seek a short cut to strong 
writing, for people will often confound the 
sources of their emotion and define a primitive 
animal zest in complicated art terms. In an early 
chapter of one of Zola's novels, a young girl 
comes to a horrible death from an explosion, and 
in the remainder of the book he recurs at short 
134 



ADVENTURES OF A PLAYGOER 

intervals to the mangled body of the fair young 
girl ripped open by dynamite. A fascinated re- 
viewer described the expedient as a wonderfully 
skilful use of the Wagnerian leit mot'w. If the 
kind of interest does not matter, it should be easy 
to start a thrill, for people of artistic tempera- 
ment are as likely as not to mistake their back- 
bones for their souls, and once a-quiver, they are 
as indifferent as jelly-bags to the cause of it. 
The cheats of the artistic temper are seldom 
caught by self -analysis, and few of d'Annunzio's 
admirers know how they came by their goose- 
flesh. In the Dead City the fictitious element of 
mere ghastliness is so nearly the whole thing that 
there is nothing left for art to do. In this unin- 
spired following of the Oedipus, ancient Greek 
seemliness gives way to modern Latin unreserve, 
and Nemesis becomes a buzzard, and a little man 
bustles officiously among horrors which only a 
genius could discreetly deal with. 

The offence of the plays is not in their sub- 
jects but in their methods, and the offended part 
of us is not our morals but our taste. The irk- 
135 



ADVENTURES OF A PLAYGOER 

some continuity of the passions, the fewness and 
fixity of the ideas, the unauthenticated emotions, 
the fatal absence of humor leave us with 
the sense of humanity unrealized and a 
world shut out. While there are afflicted people 
like those in the Dead City, it is cheerful to think 
that there are at least sanitariums with kind at- 
tendants and capable house physicians, and that 
one encounters them singly in the outside world, 
never a whole troop of them at once. D'An- 
nunzio measures tragedy by the mere bulk of 
suffering. If murder is to be done in the end, he 
sprinkles blood in the first act, gouges out an 
eye in the second, cuts off a head in the third. 
He supplements adultery by the amputation of a 
woman's hands, and enhances incest by a most 
pathetic case of total blindness and a final drown- 
ing scene. Not that this is the whole story. 
There is symbolism, and there are the Herculean 
efforts of a minor poet to rise to the height of his 
great argument. And it is well known that 
minor poetry is of all things the most perishable. 
Truth may traverse many languages and laugh- 
136 



ADVENTURES OF A PLAYGOER 

ter may drift around the world, but minor poetry 
dies on the frontier of its own barnyard. It is a 
field of endeavor wherein the taste of the words 
makes all the difference. But Ibsen can hold up 
his head in English, and so can Sudermann, and 
it is hard to believe that d'Annunzio, as a play- 
wright, would so ignominiously disappear if there 
had been more of him to start with. 

Sudermann's Joy of Living profits greatly 
by comparison. Those who called it the highest 
peak of the intellectual drama in modern times 
were probably measuring Sudermann in units of 
Mr. Clyde Fitch, but they might safely have 
said it was one of the largest toads in the sea- 
son's dramatic puddle. It was certainly the 
most "literary," the most "psychological," the 
best presented, and, above all, the most debated. 
The ancient story of the unfaithful wife and 
her excuses, the trusting husband who is unde- 
ceived, the disloyal friend, despair, atonement, 
suicide, is told again, but in a modern, analytical 
way. The wife's sin sprang from her higher 
nature. Her soul, it seems, was fit for better 
137 



ADVENTURES OF A PLAYGOER 

company. The other man was on her spiritual 
plane, while her husband, though amiable and 
worthy, was intellectually several pegs below her. 
Should she not taste the joy of living? Better to 
have soared and suffered than never to have 
soared at all. So Beata soared away from the 
marriage tie at the behest of the joy of living. 
But only for a little while, and the three short 
years of sin were followed by twelve of atone- 
ment. She made her husband happy, and Rich- 
ard, her former lover, became his closest friend. 
She induced her husband to resign his seat in 
Parliament in order that Richard's brilliant gifts 
might have a fair field. Michael, the husband, 
loyal and unsuspicious, and believing with her in 
Richard's genius, threw himself into the canvass 
heart and soul. Richard was elected, but in a 
campaign pamphlet allusion was made to a scan- 
dal involving Michael's honor, and upon ques- 
tioning his wife and Richard he learned the 
truth. All three being of noble birth, it was clear 
that in these circumstances somebody must die; 
but a duel would bring public disgrace upon two 
138 



ADVENTURES OF A PLAYGOER 

families. Richard therefore resolved on suicide. 
Bombardinian was hit and Hononchroton- 
thologos must die. One may not see the logic of 
it, quite; but it is undoubtedly the rule of aris- 
tocracy or stagecraft. In their last interview 
Beata reads his intention in his face and makes 
up her mind to kill herself that he may live. Her 
sudden death will seem more plausible, for she 
has heart disease. At a luncheon given by her 
husband to the chiefs of the party, ostensi- 
bly in honor of Richard's success, but really 
to quiet suspicion, she makes an ironical 
speech in praise of the joy of living and takes 
poison. After her death the two men read a 
letter she has left saying that Richard now 
must live. He agrees to live, and the play is 
ended. 

Shall we fly to our hearthstones, like the good 
old-fashioned critic of the stage, and with purple 
cheeks burst into alliterative wrath and call it a 
"fetid phantasy".'^ Must we be fierce as fogies 
and tear the language all to smithereens trying 
to find things bad enough to say of "tainted 
139 



ADVENTURES OF A PLAYGOER 

talent" and of "putrid plays" and all the "slith- 
ering slime" of "poisoned pruriency"? Or dare 
we at this late day be less robustious? To con- 
demn the play, as many have done, on the 
strength of the theme alone would commit one to 
a ruthless policy. The world has gone too far; 
too many novels and poems and plays are framed 
on it ; the classics are still too fresh in our minds ; 
books are too accessible, even to the young, for 
any such spinster censorship. The main defect 
of the play is its limitation of interest. The 
"problem" that has lately usurped the stage — the 
only problem, they would have us think, that of 
husband and wife and a tertium quid, whether 
male or female — is becoming wearisome even to 
those who are firmly convinced that monogamy 
will last of itself though they strike no blow for 
it. Clever as Sudermann is, he has failed to sug- 
gest in his naked souls the least variety. He 
catches a single emotion from life and isolates it. 
Beata lives and dies with it. You would never 
guess it was part of her higher life if he did not 
tell you so. Nor is there anything in Richard 
UO 



ADVENTURES OF A PLAYGOER 

to explain why she is drawn to him. It is taken 
for granted that they are spiritual mates, and a 
great deal results from it. Somehow or other 
we are to assume that the angels contrived it, and 
if human institutions stand in the way, they must 
be swept aside by a noble sin. Their souls are 
endowed with heavenly humps of the same pat- 
tern. It is intellectually bare, purely emotional, 
the mechanics of unlawful love, and though it is 
most skilfully devised, you watch it only as a 
game and think what a tight and narrow little 
place the present stage is. Why should we be so 
mercilessly confined.? A man is larger than his 
largest passion ; a woman is better than her love, 
and souls that run like tram-cars on their rails 
make for the madhouse in the outside world. But 
the poor starvelings of the stage must shiver 
always in their moral barebones, and because 
their maker could not give them flesh we say. 
How searching his "psychology"! Those who 
have a birthright to their art always suggest com- 
plexity. From them you guess a world of many 
things, however simple their means may seem. 
141 



ADVENTURES OF A PLAYGOER 

They never keep you staring stupidly at any 
single pinwheel of passion. 

Nor do they, like Mr. Bernard Shaw, aim 
merely to prove something. It is well known that 
Mr. Shaw does not wish to be regarded as merely 
brilliant. He demands a fair judgment on the 
truth of what he has to say apart from his man- 
ner of saying it. He professes a message and he 
is not satisfied with a smile of intellectual pleas- 
ure or a stare of astonishment. Like most sensi- 
tive and clever men, he hates an attempt to classi- 
fy him, and he would try to squirm out of any 
adjective that is at all definite. At a public 
meeting not long ago, some one having intro- 
duced him with the remark that his only fault 
was that he was too talented, he rose and said that 
his talents were but ordinary and that his strong 
point had always been his character. But 
though a very clever man, Mr. Shaw does not 
understand some of the simplest laws of human 
nature. He is not even aware of the danger of 
being amusing. People learn while they laugh, 
but very few of them know that they are learn- 
142 



ADVENTURES OF A PLAYGOER 

ing. When the midriff resumes its former place 
the mind pretty generally goes on as before, per- 
haps a little repentant. True prophets have 
sometimes been great humorists (witness Job), 
but their fame as prophets, I believe, was mainly 
posthumous. Cervantes laughed Spain's chi- 
valry away, but meanwhile Cervantes died. If 
]\Ir. Shaw were always right, his manner before 
the world would be sadly against him. The world 
expects from its serious men a certain degree of 
dulness. 

Compared with most of our playwrights, Mr. 
Shaw is not only far more entertaining than 
they, but sounder. It is only when we compare 
him (as he expressly demands) with the best of 
all time, that he goes to pieces. All great play- 
wrights have seen that every man was something 
more than a leading motive. They have never 
used him merely as a pawn; that is, to prove 
something. They have suggested a thousand ir- 
relevant things. At times they have almost 
seemed to forget their purpose. In any true 
comedy man is a small figure dancing against the 
14S 



ADVENTURES OF A PLAYGOER 

sky — temporal antics on a background of ulti- 
mate facts, birth and death and eternity. That 
is the only joke, and every great writer has per- 
ceived it. Not one of them has ever been a mere 
debater of propositions. No writer ever created 
a man without suggesting a mystery. The 
plain man has this in common with Shake- 
speare : He too is aware of unknown things, makes 
guesses, and is quite unreasonable. His mys- 
teries begin too soon, but he has them. From 
merely clever people you might suppose there 
was no mystery at all. They make things so 
clear to you. 



144 



ADVENTURES OF A PLAYGOER 
IV 

CONVENTIONAL PLAYS 

On seeing a succession of conventional plays I 
have often blessed my stars that I was not a 
technical critic of the stage. For months at a 
time the condition of the American drama is such 
that it would seem desirable for any grown-up, 
serious man to drop the subject altogether. If 
he went to the theatre during that interval it was 
simply a frivolous mistake. Surely it is not 
worth while to express one's self very solemnly 
about it. That is where the natural man has a 
great advantage over critics. He may stop 
talking, if he likes, as soon as his thought ceases, 
whereas by the strange compulsion of the press 
they must keep straight on, not only when they 
prefer not to do so themselves, but when others 
prefer not to have them. It is a fancied obliga- 
tion, arising from some sort of a social misunder- 
standing ; and every one is the worse for it. For 
truthful comment on ordinary books and plays, 
give me the private monosyllable, the sigh of a 
145 



ADVENTURES OF A PLAYGOER 

personal friend, the look of the latest victim — 
anything, in fact, but the reluctant fluency 
of professionals. Not that this miserably 
didactic group of men are in any sense to blame 
for it. It should not be forgotten that most 
dramatic criticism is written by persons who 
would rather be in bed. It is a thought that dis- 
poses one to charity. It is an inhuman system 
that requires a man to talk like an Act of Con- 
gress about every little thing that comes along. 
Sometimes, like Troilus, in the play, he should 
be permitted to say: "I cannot fight upon this 
argument. It is too starved a subject for my 
sword." Little do we outsiders know of that 
awful scramble for edifying words on the eve of 
publication, or those barbarous contracts where- 
by critics, like hydraulic pumps, are constrained 
to continuous expression. They account, no 
doubt, for many things that puzzle us — for the 
amazing difference between what we see and what 
we read about, between the living and the writ- 
ing man. Why this grim little set of duties? 
Surely one may take his private ease at the play- 
146 



ADVENTURES OF A PLAYGOER 

house without bothering about teaching people 
what they ought to Hke or elevating anything. 
The tastes have no ambassadors, and sometimes 
the main use of criticism is in showing what man- 
ner of man the critic is. An attempt at conver- 
sion in this field is an impertinence. It was in the 
hope that we should remain in some respects un- 
like that Nature made so many of us and put us 
up in separate packages. Yet for one man who 
expresses his own taste we have a hundred mis- 
sionaries to other people's. 

When we simple-minded heathen read the 
elaborate critical reviews of certain society 
plays we begin to wonder if there is anything on 
the stage quite so artificial as this criticism. 
They are harmless little conventional plays, and 
every one who sees them knows he is more or less 
pleasantly wasting his time. No one but a critic 
with a public duty to perform would dream of 
looking at them in that solemn way. They van- 
ish upon analysis ; they are built on patterns, and 
not on plots, and nobody either likes or dislikes 
them for the important reasons the critics give. 



ADVENTURES OF A PLAYGOER 

On the other hand, there are a hundred small 
matters of vital importance to us which these 
guardians of public morals and tastes take no 
account of. 

No man, unless he were thinking for publica- 
tion, would give a moment's reflection to the 
moral effects of the typically wicked little so- 
ciety play wherein we try to imitate the French 
from a distance. If he shudders all the way 
through, it is not a moral shudder. It is only 
distaste for sheer coarseness. The result of an 
Anglo-Saxon determination to be French is 
usually coarseness. Critics confound their re- 
pugnance for this kind of thing with moral in- 
dignation. It has no higher source than the dis- 
like of celluloid cuffs and large paste diamonds. 
It is the characterstic of the so-called sinful 
American play that the devil himself has lost 
all his devilish graces. Why bother our heads 
about the morals of an enchantress, in the pres- 
ence of the cold, hard fact that she does not en- 
chant ? 

It is one of the ironies of this world that we 
148 



ADVENTURES OF A PLAYGOER 

dislike people most for the qualities they cannot 
help, and if you were required honestly to select 
the nine persons whom you would most willingly 
see hanged, I venture to say that nine entirely 
blameless lives would be sacrificed. Thence comes 
it that the admirable objective reasons the critics 
give for approving or disapproving things on 
the stage are so unsatisfying. We are the most 
violent when there is no reason at all, but only a 
personal distinction. Abstract justice is beyond 
us, and we may as well frankly admit that we are 
biased on the subject of every play we have ever 
seen. 

In all things below the range of genius it is 
foolish to talk in universal terms. Whim is a 
just enough god for the small matters of every 
day, and life has large areas of licensed anarchy 
where truth cannot reach as far as your next- 
door neighbor. Yet we approach these subjects 
with a gravity which has always been the angels' 
greatest joke — the sort of gravity that the 
Frenchman meant when he called it "a mystery 
of the body invented to conceal the failings of 
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ADVENTURES OF A PLAYGOER 

the soul." We are forever laying down the law 
where there is no law, and setting up a model 
when it is the greatest of Heaven's mercies to 
allow all models to be departed from. We Amer- 
icans are imaginative in business (where our 
heart is), but businesslike in our imagination. 
The aim of American playwrights is to be in- 
stantly comprehensible to every member of a 
miscellaneous crowd, and criticism, which on cer- 
tain occasions ought to be merely a matter of 
good-tempered self -revelation, seeks always to 
establish a constitution and by-laws for the art of 
pleasing. That is why the unedited American is 
so much more delightful than his cautious broth- 
er with the pen, and why the best things that 
life has to offer are not yet either printed or 
staged. But taking it all in all, the critics do 
not come so near the stage as the stage comes to 
reality. I can recall several passages in Amer- 
ican plays, but not one word of the criticism. 



150 



ADVENTURES OF A PLAYGOER 



PRIVATE TASTES AND PRINTED 
CRITICISM 

After reading many pages of dramatic criti- 
cism, some of it quite serious and bearing a good 
French stamp, I am still harassed by doubts as 
to the limits of the personal equation. Why that 
air of more than personal certainty? Where is 
the table of weights and measures by which plays 
and players are so surely gauged? Many a critic 
is so sure of his ground that he seems more like a 
committee framing resolutions than a man writ- 
ing down what he thinks, and he usually wishes 
to save or elevate the public, direct, sanctify, and 
govern it, or hold it on his knee. One of them re- 
cently remarked that after laboring in the vine- 
yard for fifteen years without effecting the least 
improvement in other people's tastes, he had 
abandoned his didactic mission with a sinking 
heart. A trained and technical public taster, 
and yet without a single convert, he now lives as 
a private person, lonesome but correct. Most 
critics believe that technical experience gives 
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ADVENTURES OF A PLAYGOER 

them a certain authority, and the worst of their 
worries is the presumption of discordant and 
haphazard persons like you and me, who feel 
that there is a broad zone of dramatic matters 
where it is unsafe for a minute to take the word 
of another unless we know his birth, breeding, 
family history, associations in early life, the 
books he reads, his manners at table, and the 
sort of wife he enjoys. What is the foot-pound 
of gentility and where is the trigonometry of 
grace, and why take a man's word for the charm 
of the leading lady unless we know the man? It 
is delightful to express one's views on these points 
but preposterous for others to accept them. It 
is pleasant to argue but hideous to convince, and 
for my part I should loathe a convert in this field 
the moment I had made him, as a mere tedious 
duplicate when one of us was enough. 

Current criticism seems largely an effort to 
speak impersonally on purely personal affairs. 
In a region of licensed disorder people still ask 
for a rule. So the stage critic becomes a priest 
of prejudice, a little Moses on a Sinai of whim, 
15^ 



ADVENTURES OF A PLAYGOER 

absolute where everything is relative, sure of a 
right way and a wrong way where either way 
will send you fast asleep, a specialist in things 
that do not matter, and a moral guide through 
nonsense where the deadly sins seem silly and the 
devil feels too depressed to tempt. Nothing on 
the stage is so far removed from human nature as 
the things we read about it, and the world is not a 
whit more pompous behind footlights than it is 
when it takes up its pen. That is why I pause 
here in a paroxysm of humility to remark that 
any commentary of mine is not true for any 
other person under the sun but reports things as 
they seem exclusively to my round and artless 
eyes, that I mean to be a mother to no man, that 
sic vos non vohis is no motto for me but for 
sheep, bees, pedagogues, and preachers, the Em- 
peror William, the evening newspaper, and the 
United States Supreme Court. 

Principles may be had for the asking, but in 

spite of the large population of this planet men 

and women remain to-day the most inaccessible 

things on it. Plays may be true to every drama- 

153 



ADVENTURES OF A PLAYGOER 

tic principle, run like clockwork, have a good 
idea behind them, fit the audience like an old 
coat, lack nothing in short that you could give 
a name to. The playwright may be so clever 
that you can suggest in him no possible improve- 
ment except that he be born again. There are 
dozens of negatively admirable plays and irre- 
proachable pipy Wrights. They lack only the qual- 
ities for which there is no formula to make them 
Shakespearos, every one. It cannot even be ex- 
plained what makes the difference between such 
a play as Whitewashing Julia by Mr. Jones, and 
The Admirable Crichton by Mr. Barrie. Were 
I writing its prospectus I could make White- 
washing Julia look the better of the two, or at 
least the more novel. Mr. Jones takes the prov- 
erb, The pot calls the kettle black, and by means 
of it saves Julia from her enemies, but he departs 
from dramatic usage by leaving us certain that 
the pot told the truth. The fact that Julia is not 
whitewashed and that he lets us see her to a final 
triumph over worse sinners, who are also less at- 
tractive, than herself makes the play essentially 
164 



ADVENTURES OF A PLAYGOER 

plausible and new. Besides that, it is, as the 
critics say, "well built," which means that the 
playwright has graciously supplied every effect 
with a cause, believing that the human reason in 
a debased form may still perdure even in a play- 
goer. 

Therein also the play is unusual. Contrast it, 
for instance, with this excellent example of good, 
every-day dramatic merchandise, where the main 
point is whether the situations are amusing and 
not how they came about: A nice woman di- 
vorces a worthless husband and a nice man 
divorces a worthless wife. It would be cheerful, 
thinks the playwright, to make the two good 
ones pair off, so in comes coincidence, like a fairy 
godmother, and the thing is done. Though at 
present unaware of each other's identity, it 
seems that they have known and loved each 
other long ago — coincidence No. 1. It seems 
also that the worthless husband of the one has 
been misconducting himself with the worthless 
wife of the other — coincidence No. S. And so 
from many minor surprises, assumed names, and 
155 



ADVENTURES OF A PLAYGOER 

mistaken identities, there results the typical 
"comedy of manners," derived from nothing ever 
seen outside the theatre, but shrewdly based on 
long acquaintance with the audience within. No 
one can say whether it is comedy half -drunk or 
farce half-sober, and nobody cares, except the 
clever people who are always waking up at the 
wrong time. Several critics fretted because the 
worthless husband shammed fits which they called 
a low trick for the benefit of the gallery. But 
there is a gallery, is there not.^^ And it has just 
as good a right to its fits as the orchestra stalls 
to their jovial divorces. Something for every- 
body is the kindly democratic motto of a good 
market play. If by chance an idiot should stray 
into the family circle, even he must not be coldly 
ignored. 

On this plane let us make no class dis- 
tinctions, and above all let us not be invidiously 
thoughtful. It is the typical comedy; and the 
typical comedy is the blindman's bluff of the 
understanding, and the clever people are the hor- 
rid little wretches who peep. If we join in the 
156 



ADVENTURES OF A PLAYGOER 

game let us regard the rules. If we stand 
apart as public enlighteners, then let us be con- 
sistently vigilant. Uproot the platitude wherever 
found. Crucify the comic weekly papers. 
Perish the political speech and the afternoon tea 
and the latest novel and the woman's hat. Let 
there be a total silence to be broken only by bril- 
liant remarks. "The existing popular drama 
of the day," says Mr. Bernard Shaw, "is quite 
out of the question for cultivated people who are 
accustomed to use their brains." The existing 
popular anything is also out of the question. In 
fact, the population itself is no fit company for 
the clever people. If they ever saw things in 
their actual relations, what a lot there would be 
for them to do ! 

But Whitewashing Julia belongs to another 
class of plays, because it bears traces of the 
author's effort to set down what is in his own 
head instead of what he finds ready-made in the 
heads of his audience. Mr. Jones meant to be 
artistic. He wished to handle an old theme in a 
light, graceful, and novel manner. There is, 
157 



ADVENTURES OF A PLAYGOER 

however, no recipe for that manner, and though 
the dialogue was strewn with his good intentions 
we did not see any sign of fulfillment. It was as 
good a play in outline as any presented during 
the season, and as well acted. Its construction is 
undeniably good, and the construction of some of 
Shakespeare's plays is, as critics have often 
proven, undeniably bad. But Mr. Jones has a 
heavy English middle-class way with him and if 
he steps lightly his joints crack. He has no 
special pleasure in living, but he is grimly deter- 
mined that you shall think he knows life. He 
never knew an individual, but he can gather types. 
Like the blind man in the Bible, he sees men as 
trees walking ; and he has learned their botanical 
names. With a good point he is a little too em- 
phatic. His amusing things are a little too pro- 
longed. He is the sort of man about whom you 
feel instinctively. How like he is to everybody 
else. It is a deep internal little trouble — no one 
to blame but Mother Nature — a private matter, 
a mere accident of birth. 

The elements of The Admirable Crichton are 
153 



ADVENTURES OF A PLAYGOER 

not all amazing. ]Mr. Barrie merely happened 
to notice that people have an amusing way of 
mistaking their luck for their merits, confound- 
ing circumstances with native gifts, and caste 
with personal differences. So he wrecked a half- 
dozen of them on an island and made new cir- 
cumstances to make new men not to prove any- 
thing that we did not know before, but just for 
the pleasure of seeing an old truth freshly. It 
is a series of elementary propositions. Deduct 
from a pompous old earl what society gives him 
and there may be only enough of him left to play 
on an accordeon. Banish the second son of a 
peer from his environment and he may just 
barely make of himself an indifferent carpenter. 
Lady Agatha may be by natural gifts a fish- 
woman and Lady Mary just clever enough to 
wait at table, and it may be that the only person 
whom nature has well endowed is the butler. And 
should that distinguished household be stranded 
on a lonely island its members would soon shake 
down into their natural places, leaving the butler 
at the top. On this simple and sure foundation 
159 



ADVENTURES OF A PLAYGOER 

there would inevitably rise in that lonely isle a 
butler-monarchy, wherein the subject class would 
consist of worn-out lords and useless mistresses, 
who would be as servile under the new conditions 
as they were pretentious under the old. Then if 
suddenly restored to their own community, they 
would fall at once into their old grooves and de- 
spise the butler and try to forget ; and the butler 
being a man of sense would expect to be despised, 
for he knows them by this time for ordinary 
people, that is to say, inert, custom-made crea- 
tures, who move only as they are pushed. The 
idea is as common as air, and many social phi- 
losophers have made books of it, weighing as 
much as ten pounds each. If it seems new, that 
is where the art comes in. The fancy takes its 
fun with just these familiar things which it car- 
ries out into little concrete surprises, proving 
that human nature has no end, and the world no 
commonplace. Art has no horror of an old fact, 
but of an old mind to see it with. 

For any artistic enterprise to prosper it must 
receive a subsidy from on high, and Mr. Barrie 
160 



ADVENTURES OF A PLAYGOER 

starts with an unfair advantage over Mr. Jones. 
With him "the httle gods" cooperated, and so he 
"found a way." That is the thing that makes 
the difference — the only thing that really mat- 
ters — and I defy any man to explain. 

These considerations (and a dozen other con- 
crete instances would serve as well or better) 
should impel critics now and again to lay aside 
judicial airs and paternal manners and confess 
that they are quite ignorant of other people's 
truth, that the best things are always the least 
definable, that art fails in proportion as we can 
state its formulas and that the world is a play 
that would not be worth the seeing if we knew the 
plot. And when it comes to the conventional 
drama, the cheese and garlic in the windmill, 
mere social peanuts and popcorn, his emotions 
are not very important. They are for the most 
part harmless little circus feelings which no 
words in the critical vocabulary seem to fit. And 
this, as I take it, is a good safe rule for any 
critic : No matter how many the swans were in his 
youth, if he would grow old decently he must cul- 
161 



ADVENTURES OF A PLAYGOER 

tivate a friendly willingness toward a widening 
circle of geese. Otherwise he will become that 
saddest of barnyard reformers, the crusader 
against commonplace, and the world will squeak 
as it turns on its axis, and he may find himself 
too serious a person even for the angels when he 
dies. 

All of which sounds rather devil-may-care, 
but it is not. It holds true in larger matters 
than the present stage. There are things on 
which we ought all to agree : The Binomial For- 
mula, that kind hearts are more than coronets, 
the law of diminishing returns, monogamy, the 
exiguity of American literature, the Ten Com- 
mandments, and that Shakespeare is greater than 
Alexander Pope. There are things in which it 
is desirable forever to disagree : The meaning of 
life, the proper way to boil an egg, choosing a 
wife, which of Shakespeare's plays is the best, 
and the real reason for disliking Jones and ad- 
miring a sunset. No critic whose work has en- 
dured ever wished to impose on others the precise 
hierarchy of his enjoyments. He never was 
162 



ADVENTURES OF A PLAYGOER 

mainly a fisher of men, and if now and then he 
seems to land some of them body and soul, they 
are mostly the little ones. John Ruskin, bent 
on rescue though he was, knew in his heart that 
he would never have made people think at all if 
he had not made them think differently. Had he 
ever met his spiritual twin he would certainly 
have trumped up some excuse for a fight with 
him. Every true critic is academic, impression- 
istic, a hermit, a leader of men, an epicure, a 
missionary, and at the last analysis a human be- 
ing more in need of company than disciples. He 
expounds the law and loves the diversity within 
the law ; writes sometimes for the good of men 
and sometimes for the fun of it. And if he is 
not all this, and a good deal more, his books are 
buried with him. We lesser folks are not to 
blame if we betray an equal laxity. 

Whenever an academic writer reads a book he 
thinks at once of his duty to man and hunts for 
a useful lesson. When a phrasemaker reads it, he 
thinks, Here is my chance for a perfectly stun- 
ning stage entrance. One weighs a ton and the 



ADVENTURES OF A PLAYGOER 

other weighs nothing at all. The critics of the 
chair, prosectors in literary anatomy, Casaubons, 
commentators, biologists of books divide the field 
with the harlequins. Neither class shows any lik- 
ing for the thing itself. They sweat with pur- 
pose and descant on pleasure with a gritting of 
teeth. Mr. Bernard Shaw would die of shame if 
caught with a platitude upon him. Professor 
Junk would die of fear if caught without one. 
Mr. Shaw, hot on the trail of paradox, will show 
that Shakespeare never conceived a human char- 
acter. Professor Junk, author of "Hybridisa- 
tion of Fiction Forms," classifies all novels by 
their "central thoughts," counts the nouns in 
"Paradise Lost," shows how Poe's "Raven" was 
anticipated twenty centuries ago by Kia Yi, the 
Chinaman. In a solemn voice they bid you 
choose, like Hercules at the road-forks. Are you 
academic? Then you must never smoke your 
pipe except for what it teaches. Are you "im- 
pressionistic" ? Then you will never light a pipe 
when there are Roman candles. 

After living for a while among these old der- 
164i 



ADVENTURES OF A PLAYGOER 

ricks of the academic world you grow very tired 
of the uplift. Is there to be no talk among 
equals? When you meet a man must you im- 
mediately heave yourself up alongside and try 
to hoist him? Pen and ink and a sleepless pur- 
pose either to instruct or amaze, vigilant self- 
omission, the habit of talking down, a close 
reckoning on the public (how high this sentence 
will hft it, how much it will be tickled by that), 
give to our critical writings the look of a steam 
roller flattening out the angle of variation. A 
good deal of the work should be transferred to 
the government at Washington, where it could 
easily fit in under the Secretary of Agriculture, 
be attached perhaps to the Bureau of Animal In- 
dustry. Leave out the man and the rest is as easy 
as crop reports. Leave the man in and there is 
not only the danger of deviation, but of a guilty 
pleasure in other people's diversity. For in 
private life we allow ourselves great unconcern 
and many irrelevances. We are never exclusively 
gymnasts, wits, anti-imperialists, or crowbars of 
the higher plane. There is a large region wherein 
165 



ADVENTURES OF A PLAYGOER 

we are glad to see our neighbors going their 
own way. In private life we insist on having 
our own latch key and dying a separate death. 
It is only in print that people are less than their 
propaganda and that the desire of making a 
proselyte underlies every word. Print is the only 
place where men are merely pattern-makers, and 
where, if you say that patterns are not your 
sole interest night and day, you are set down as 
a debauchee, careless how many rascals may es- 
cape between your sentences. 

But if you cannot guide the public aright, 
why address it.? It is like saying. If you can- 
not reform a man, why speak to him.'' Somehow 
or other, the words must come out and when a 
man has more to say than people will submit to 
face to face, it is customary now to print it. 
Should the day ever come when the world will 
neither listen nor read, there will still be a roar 
of soliloquies. Strike us dumb and we shall carve 
our thoughts upon the trees or tattoo our bodies 
with them. 

166 



PART V 

RIGOURS OF THE HIGHER 
EDUCATION 



BACCALAUREATE SERMONS 

In the month of roses the newspapers are full of 
unwise quotations from the baccalaureate ser- 
mons which have been given in various parts of 
the country. The quotations are unwise because, 
when unaided by the voice or presence of the 
speaker, a random passage from a pulpit oration 
is apt to seem ineffective. And when you see a 
dozen such passages in parallel columns, you suf- 
fer a little from a sense of uniformity. It would 
be indelicate to say weariness, for you know those 
exhorters to be good men and true, and you honor 
their motives and respect the occasion and the 
167 



RIGOURS OF EDUCATION 

practice. Your doubts have to do with the style 
of the address and that only. It is the extreme 
usualness of this style that is most striking. To 
be sure, the speakers are addressing the same 
class of men on the same sort of an occasion, and 
you would not expect any great variations in 
essentials. Nor is a usual style necessarily a bad 
style. Witness the liturgies. Still there is a 
limit beyond which the same phrase or turn of 
thought will not serve, in spite of the vast store 
of moral earnestness behind it. 

Now the graduates addressed are very young 
men, and most gloriously blessed with inexpe- 
rience, but they have as a rule gone far enough in 
their lives to have made the acquaintance of the 
obvious. There are some things which a bacca- 
laureate sermon should take for granted. It is 
indiscreet, for instance, to tell the young grad- 
uates that they stand on the threshold of life in 
the presence of golden opportunities. The truth 
of that statement is unimpeachable, but the time 
has now come when it should be conveyed in some 
other way. It can never reach any human mind 
168 



RIGOURS OF EDUCATION 

in its original package. Besides, there is no risk 
in assuming that the young graduate knows he is 
standing on the threshold of life or is in a fair 
way to guess at it. Youth is very simple and 
beautiful, but the mind is not a virgin forest 
even at twenty-one. And the "moral uplift" 
parts of the baccalaureate sermon are in especial 
need of revision. The "battle of life" should 
be approached with caution by the speaker as 
well as by the graduate. When he turns solemnly 
on him and makes his voice shake and says, 
"Young man, gird on the armor of righteousness 
and go forth. Go forward and not back ; up and 
not down ; choose the better instead of the worse ; 
aim high and not low," there is no young man's 
mind within range. Moral uplift is a splendid 
thing, but this particular derrick is worn out. 
That is all. 

A common feature of baccalaureate sermons is 
the advice to go forth and purify politics. It 
is rarely any more specific than this. Carry high 
ideals into public life and purge away iniquity. 
Is there a young man living who does not know 
169 



RIGOURS OF EDUCATION 

he ought to do it? They would wake up ivith a 
start if the speaker told them how to do it, but 
he never does. Perhaps it is too much to expect 
that a man should specify. But he can at least 
omit the generalities, for they do no good. 
"Gentlemen of the graduating class," said a 
baccalaureate speaker, "I sympathize with you 
in the problems that are facing you. Choose 
well, choose wisely, choose conscientiously, live 
under the influence of high ideals. Live, my 
brothers, an unselfish life." It will never do. 
It is a case of youth, not of arrested development. 
There are specific shams to be peeled off and 
specific lies to be nailed, and they know it. Hack- 
neyism is hackneyism, whether it is the work of 
saint or sinner, and the eff^ect of it is to put to 
sleep every particle of truth that it touches. 

It should be assumed that a college student 
knows in a general way that a high moral plane 
is preferable to a low moral plane. If he goes 
wrong it will not be from ignorance of this broad 
truth. When he steps across the threshold he is 
not likely to meet any one who will tell him in so 
170 



RIGOURS OF EDUCATION 

many words that the low ideal is the better. 
Every one is most deferential to the high moral 
principle. In politics he will find purifiers every- 
where. So long as he confines himself to the gen- 
eral principle he will have the whole world with 
him. In "the battle of life" both sides have the 
same moral war whoop. That is a troublesome 
point about which baccalaureate sermons are not 
explicit. 



171 



RIGOURS OF EDUCATION 

II 

THE SIGNIFICANCE OF FRESHMEN 

Now THAT September has come again freshmen 
are the fruit in season, and the colleges through- 
out the land are fast gathering in the crop. 
Within the next few days the returns will all be 
in and the seven hundred and ninety odd institu- 
tions that divide the harvest will be drawing les- 
sons of hope or discouragement from their re- 
spective shares. Meanwhile the palpitating 
freshman takes his last desperate dig at the 
"horse" quite as if he were not the most coveted 
of objects. Nor is it likely that you could con- 
vince him that he is so yearned after. He is 
prone rather to believe that he is the victim of a 
discriminating exclusiveness. Did he know that 
out of those same seven hundred and ninety odd 
institutions in these United States a probable two 
hundred would not have the heart to reject him 
for anything short of dementia or debauchery, he 
might take courage. For there is in certain 
quarters a most unappeasable hankering after 

m 



RIGOURS OF EDUCATION 

freshmen, as our commissioner of education well 
knows. Freshmen must be had on any terms. 
With a falling off in freshmen down goes the 
pulse of the institution, down go the president's 
reputation and the treasurer's receipts and the 
professor's salaries, and the alumni's hopes and 
about everything else that it is the purpose of 
the institution to keep up. This being so, is it 
not better that the bars at the entrance should go 
down instead? Thus reason a fair number of 
the seven hundred and ninety at the behest of 
self-preservation in the stress of competition. 

Does the rejected and discomfited freshman 
think nobody loves him? Let him listen to this: 
"One of the most discouraging features in our 
system of higher education is the lack of any 
definite, or, in fact, in a large number of states, 
the lack of any requirements or conditions ex- 
acted of institutions when authorized to confer 
degrees." It is our commissioner of education 
who says it. He calls it discouraging. That is 
his way of looking at it. When a commissioner 
of education is discouraged, the unfortunate 
173 



RIGOURS OF EDUCATION 

freshman may come by his own. Discouraging, 
indeed! It means the warmest and most wide- 
spread hospitality to freshmen of every shade of 
incapacity, a very carnival of licensed flunking. 
There are scores of colleges that are fairly starv- 
ing for the sight of them. 

So those apparently irrelevant figures showing 
the size of the freshman class as compared with 
last year and the year before, and the year before 
that have quite a dramatic import in certain 
cases. In these cases the criterion of the presi- 
dent's policy is the size of the freshman class. 
If larger than last year, it is taken to mean the 
progress of the college, more gifts for dormi- 
tories and athletic fields ; in other words, physical 
growth, and that is the only kind of growth that 
a good many of the seven hundred and ninety 
really care for. To ask what kind of freshmen 
they are, whether they are well qualified students 
or belated children, argues a suspicious mind. 
In these cases it is taken as the index figure of 
advancing culture. It is the result of a well- 
planned and well-advertised campaign for fresh- 
174. 



RIGOURS OF EDUCATION 

men ; and if the beaming president can rise at 
the alumni dinner and report the number bigger 
than last year, there is joy intense and men will 
tell you he is a "hustler and no mistake." And 
under present conditions to be pronounced a 
"hustler" by members of the alumni is for cer- 
tain of our college presidents not merely a matter 
of pride and pleasure but a sine qua non of their 
official life. 

He is a familiar figure, this educational 
"hustler." You will find him in the last report of 
the Commissioner of Education slightly exagger- 
ating the figures of attendance for his own par- 
ticular university. You will see him again in the 
newspapers next summer when extracts from the 
baccalaureate addresses begin to trickle in. 
"Young men, you are standing on the threshold. 
Go forward and not back." That is he, gentle- 
men of the alumni, and you will meet him at your 
annual dinner, where he will urge you to "keep in 
touch" with university ideals, and congratulate 
you on the completion of the new grand stand 
and on the size of the entering class. Great 
175 



RIGOURS OF EDUCATION 

things have happened under him — an era of ex- 
pansion, he will say — as you can see from any 
recent catalogue. Twice as many students as 
last year and half as much Latin and Greek, and 
but for him there would be no summer school of 
horseshoeing, no butter class or dental depart- 
ment, no marble natatorium, brownstone dormi- 
tory, fish-hatchery or cremation plant. It was 
he who said the other day that the university 
should aim at nothing but the training of special- 
ists. On no other plan can the university grow 
big so fast, and rapid bigness is of course the 
key to him and the key to educational progress — 
the football key — and why the trustees keep him 
and the papers print him and the millionaires en- 
dow him, and the faculty waits for a chance to 
prick him, which sometimes comes. Then down 
he goes, but not for long. It is a land of blessed 
chances with many things waiting for expansion. 
Out of nearly eight hundred universities surely 
some would like to swell. And the popularis aura 
is always blowing somewhere (and is especially 
fresh upon the prairies ) and to all punctured and 
176 



RIGOURS OF EDUCATION 

deflated "hustlers" democracy is kind. He will 
rise again if only to run for Congress. 

All of which contains a moral for any one that 
wants it. The freshman crop per se has no more 
to do with the higher education than the water- 
melon or the pumpkin crop. In the case of a 
well-established college, able to hold to its stand- 
ards through thick and thin, a large freshman 
class is a hopeful sign for the college and the 
community and the freshmen. But wherever the 
big class is due to methods appropriate to the ex- 
ploitation of certain brands of soap or cigarettes 
there is no comfort in it at all. It is a mere rally- 
ing of customers and can be done any time by 
marking down the goods. The commercial test 
applied to things of the spirit does not hold, and 
a boom in freshmen taken by itself is sadly am- 
biguous. For the freshman, like truth and good 
fortune and human happiness, is altogether a 
relative matter. 



177 



RIGOURS OF EDUCATION 

III 

THE COEDUCATION SCARE 

Protests of certain college students against the 
spread of coeducation have for some reason 
aroused very little sympathy outside those insti- 
tutions, and there has not been a single serious 
attempt to rescue those beleaguered young men. 
It is no longer possible to stir people up about 
this matter. If it means that the male sex is go- 
ing to be dashed to pieces, it cannot be helped. 
The great majority of American men are fatal- 
ists in all that regards the woman's movement. 
They have no sex-patriotism, and they feel noth- 
ing but an idle curiosity when they see a brother 
struggling against odds. Such of our universi- 
ties as have let young women in must take the 
consequences. Whether the men organize and 
fight, or take to the woods, or stay and fraternize 
with the enemy to the eternal undoing of their 
manly characters, makes not the slightest dif- 
ference to the community at large. Things have 
come to such a pass that not one of us would lift 
178 



RIGOURS OF EDUCATION 

a finger on their behalf. It was not so very long 
ago that a good many of us were seriously 
alarmed. What has so brutalized us ? 

Recently, when a university professor began 
to bleat most piteously over the danger to his 
manliness from the fact that there were so many 
women near him, the comments of the press 
were not only unsympathetic ; they were actually 
derisive. Their general tone was, Let his virility 
go. Who cares .f^ It sounds unfeeling, but it 
fairly expresses the views of most people toward 
this side of the coeducation question to-day. No 
one wants to see the undergraduate courses of 
all men's or women's colleges thrown open to 
both sexes, but in those which are already co- 
educational the male students will never touch 
our hard hearts by referring to their endangered 
manhood. You cannot make a man by hiding 
him from women; and supposing you did suc- 
ceed in keeping a small flame of manly vigor in 
him, what good would it do? As soon as you let 
him go, along would come some rough and bois- 
terous female and blow it out. 
179 



RIGOURS OF EDUCATION 

This is too hard a life with too many calls on 
our energies for us to be forever chaperoning our 
own sex. If a man says he does not want women 
in the room with him when he recites at a quiz 
or listens to a lecture, let him plead shyness or 
savagery, or the decay of college spirit, or any- 
thing under the sun except this matter of im- 
perilled manhood. Even if it were frankly said 
that it was unpleasant to have women outranking 
the men in scholarship or carrying off the class 
honors, there would be a better chance 
of gaining sympathy. Every one can under- 
stand the feeling. But you might suppose 
from certain appeals that as soon as women 
broke into a college the men all took to piling 
up fruits and flowers and birds on their hat 
brims. Damaging as woman is, she is not 
contagious. And sooner or later she must 
be encountered as she steams along. It may 
be a good thing ,for the male to see the 
woman's movement at close range when he is 
very young, so that he will become used to it — 
like a colt to a railway train. For life has no 
180 



RIGOURS OF EDUCATION 

safeguards in this matter, and the world is not 
adjusted to its softest denizens. 

It is these considerations mainly that have 
made us so indifferent toward those of our 
brothers who are afraid of becoming our sisters. 
Of this much we may be certain : The true con- 
servative is not the man whose teeth take to chat- 
tering at every change. And as to the danger of 
feminization either in college or out, there are a 
thousand and one worse things to worry over. 
The system will never be given up out of regard 
for the jeopardized male. The important thing 
is its effect on the women themselves, but that is 
another story. 



181 



RIGOURS OF EDUCATION 

IV 

THE TRAINED WOMAN 

"No LONGER a debatable question," said the new 
president of a woman's college in an inaugural 
address on the propriety of a college education 
for women. Nevertheless they were debating it. 
Indeed only a short time before a writer on the 
womanly woman had inquired fiercely, "Are wo- 
men to be flowers or vegetables ?" and for months 
afterwards had his eye on the sex, bursting out 
in print at short intervals. Is woman growing 
gentler, sweeter.? he kept asking. Or will she spoil 
on our hands ? He watched her as if she were a 
watermelon. And even now, debatable or not, 
a debate is going on somewhere at every hour 
of the day or night. Still most of us have quieted 
down, believing that thought is not intrinsically 
bad for women though it may seem at present 
a trifle bizarre. The only trouble with college 
women is their pioneering air. It seems queer 
that such a commonplace thing as a college edu- 
cation should confer any sense of intellectual at- 
182 



RIGOURS OF EDUCATION 

tainment, but there are still some strange beings 
with whom the consciousness of graduation en- 
dures through life. As well expect Stanley to 
forget that he had been to Africa. But this is 
fast diminishing, and soon a girl will be able to 
go to college without the risk of thinking that 
she is doing anything remarkable. That sense 
of being remarkable when she really was not is 
what did the mischief a few years ago. 

The issue between peach-bloom and the higher 
education does not seem vitally important when 
we look back on it now. Either extreme was dis- 
agreeable, but taking them all in all there was 
not much choice between the portentous new wo- 
man and the fussy old man — the sort of man who 
trembled for the peach-bloom every time a woman 
left her house, and piped away at the sad old 
warning, No charm, no husband. It must 
have been exasperating to a woman to hear his 
constant, "Steady there, not too rough. Be sweet 
if you would be married," when she was doing 
nothing worse than working for a baccalaureate 
degree, one of the most moderate of human 
183 



RIGOURS OF EDUCATION 

achievements. The man who urged women to be 
flowers, not vegetables, feared for some reason a 
reversion to the feminine type of ancient Gaul, 
and quoted Motley's description as showing how 
hard it must be to manage her, "especially when 
she begins gnashing her teeth, her neck swollen, 
brandishing her vast and snowy arms, and kick- 
ing with her heels, to deliver her fisticuffs, like 
bolts from the twisted strings of a catapult." 
Women of this sort, he said, "are never womanly, 
and certainly not delightfully feminine." It was 
a voluminous body of writing, and as serious as 
anything we ever had. There was a cartography 
of woman's sphere and a metric system for 
feminine charm and a lot of men were doing 
picket duty on the frontiers of their own sex for 
fear women would steal their beards ; and when- 
ever an old dry twig of a convention snapped 
they said it was the breaking down of nature's 
wall. It carried the "problem" into places where 
it did not belong, and by meeting absurdity with 
absurdity encouraged the queer leaders of the 
"movement" to be queerer yet, and meanwhile it 
184 



RIGOURS OF EDUCATION 

would have had us all huddled together in mortal 
dread of an irruption of unsexed giantesses. 

Since then most of these timid protestants 
have perished, crushed to death by their huge 
wives, some say (and I hope it is true), and the 
prevailing mood nowadays is not only acquies- 
cent but patronizing. 

Under cultivation, they will say, women often 
show uncommon presence of mind and sagacity. 
Feats of this nature are recorded with great care 
in the leading periodicals as proof that the ex- 
periment was worth making. The following is 
not only typical of its class, but is so significant 
in itself that I must present it at some length. 
Two trained women were talking about the con- 
tinuous advancement of a mutual friend, when 
one of them remarked that the reason why she 
succeeded was "because she is always prepared 
for emergencies however great " 

"Or small," I added. 

"You are thinking of the magnet," was the 
quick reply. 

"The magnet.?" I questioned. 

"Yes," my acquaintance explained. "One day 

185 



Hi 



RIGOURS OF EDUCATION 

at college, one of the other girls dropped her eye- 
glasses in a narrow opening between two walls. 
She couldn't reach them, and had very nearly 
decided that they must remain permanently out 
of reach." 

"But they didn't.?" I asked with interest. 

"No," answered my acquaintance. "Our suc- 
cessful friend happened to remember that their 
frame was made of steel. She went to the phy- 
sical laboratory, borrowed a magnet, tied a string 
to it, and lowering it carefully into the opening, 
gravely drew up the eye-glasses." 

Happily, this delicious story was recounted 
to me before, in the course of my investigation, 
I had visited any colleges. At each one of the 
many girls' colleges in all parts of the country 
to which I went during the winter and spring, I 
repeated it to some person connected with the 
particular institution; and invariably that per- 
son exclaimed, "How exactly like a college girl !" 

The significant thing, of course, is the writer's 
surprise at it, and this undercurrent of cynical 
astonishment runs all through that large and 
peculiar portion of the press which is devoted to 
women's interests. Groups of women who un- 
aided have earned enough to pay their board, 
who can support themselves by their pen, who 
have weathered education without loss of good 
186 



RIGOURS OF EDUCATION 

looks, who have sat on platforms, but are now 
sitting in charming homes, who hold offices in 
clubs, successful mothers, and efficient wives, 
who can write novels nevertheless, women who 
have led "the literary life" and still are by no 
means shattered, form a necessary part of any 
illustrated periodical. It would seem that intelli- 
gence had never come to beings who less ex- 
pected it. How must they have rated themselves 
in the past? When a woman achieves an3i:hing 
nowadays, the others seem to v/rite of her as if she 
were a gorilla eating with a spoon. Yet I could 
tell tales of cunning far ahead of the anecdote 
above quoted — deeds of the barbarous and un- 
trained, deeds of the woman with pins between her 
teeth, deeds of any woman, things done with a 
man, with a hat, with an income, with no income, 
proving that if this college girl was remarkable, 
the doings of every other girl are almost incredi- 
ble. It is held, and rightly held, that this useful 
friend to man should be educated, but that is no 
reason for disparaging what nature had already 
done all by herself. Sex patriots should remem- 
187 



RIGOURS OF EDUCATION 

ber that even at the very start she was human, 
cephalic index 77 to 88, cranial capacity consid- 
erable, mistress of herself, and feeling more or 
less at home with the law of gravitation. 



188 



RIGOURS OF EDUCATION 



EDUCATIONAL EMOTIONS 

The discussion of educational topics in the press 
presents some interesting contrasts. Here, for 
example, are two college presidents who simul- 
taneously express their views as to the present 
state of the higher education in this country. 
One sees nothing but progress and the other noth- 
ing but decline, and each makes out a pretty 
good case for his own temperament. Toward the 
close of the last century, says the buoyant one, 
there were only nine colleges, and now we can 
scarcely count them. Though some of them are 
small, "most of them are eager and enthusiastic 
to serve humanity." There are fifteen million 
students in school and college and half a million 
teachers. Millions upon millions of dollars are 
spent each year in education. Studies are now 
pursued that were never heard of in the old times. 
Everywhere you turn there is something to glory 
in, and the "bare recitals of the barest facts are 
full of meaning." Put in your thumb and pull 
189 



RIGOURS OF EDUCATION 

out a plumb and spend the rest of your days in 
hurrahing. The other man soon puts a stop to 
chat. Things are worse than ever, he says. Col- 
lege education is on the wrong track and only 
breeds athletes and spendthrifts. Literary am- 
bitions are no longer entertained. "Academic 
distinction has become a matter of brawn and 
bulldog courage rather than Greek and calculus." 
"Harvard freshmen cannot write English, and 
every college president meditates an article on 
the growing illiteracy of the college student." 
"You can hardly pick up a paper without finding 
items headed 'College Ruffianism,' 'Academic 
Sluggers,' etc." "College luxury is parasitic and 
non-educational." "The undergraduate who 
cannot be made to pay for good instruction is 
lodged like a prince, indulges in expensive pleas- 
ures and wastes far more than would suffice to 
give his instructor the livelihood which he de- 
serves." In the meanwhile, "the full professor 
in a New York State college gets an average 
salary equal to that of a railroad engineer; an 
assistant professor the same as a fireman, while 
190 



RIGOURS OF EDUCATION 

an instructor is rewarded equally with a brake- 
man." 

The greater part of what has been published 
on educational subjects for some time past is of 
this character, and we outsiders who would like to 
get at the truth are having a bad time of it. 
But this much we know: Whatever the system 
may be, if it is responsible for making men talk 
like this there is something the matter with it. 
There is little to choose between these two views. 
It is not good for a generation's health to think 
too much about its enormous strides. For whose 
sake are we advertising ? The educator is apt to 
catch this trick from the writer on industrial 
progress. He counts up heads as if they were 
steel rails for export, and computes the cost of 
plant to tickle us with the sound of millions. 
While under his spell we forget that it makes the 
least difference what kind of heads they are or 
what they are filled with. A larger entering 
class than ever before, gentlemen of the alumni, 
and a new endowment for the swimming tank, 
to be known as the John Henry Jones swimming 
191 



RIGOURS OF EDUCATION 

tank. What can these preoccupied persons do 
for education? They lead nowhere. They are 
behind with the band reporting progress on a big 
trombone. If there were a dead silence on these 
points for the next ten years the higher educa- 
tion would not slow up in the least. There are 
other ways of growing than of growing fat, and 
the over-emphasis on mere size has been carried to 
absurd lengths. 

But if wealth and numbers are no fair test in 
this matter of outdoing ancestors, it is just as 
unwise to spread the belief that we are breeding 
out into illiterate prize-fighters and luxurious 
parasites. The questions of college athletics 
will never be answered by a man who sees items 
on "College Ruffianism, etc.," in almost every 
newspaper he takes up, for these items are very 
rare. It is a strictly personal hallucination. 
And as for luxury, the man who has money to 
spend will spend it at college. There is no reason 
why social differences should stop at the college 
grounds. We impose no vows of poverty. It is 
just as well that the college should not be too 
192 



RIGOURS OF EDUCATION 

unlike the world, since the graduate is bound to 
go there. If we would make it a monastery we 
should not let him out. And were the universities 
of sixty years ago so very different? Men had 
less to spend, but they let fly what they had, and 
from the sad tales of Oxford which date from that 
time, did the princeliest kind of things on credit. 
Talking along these respective lines is not help- 
ful. It is less the result of thought than of two 
sets of antithetic emotions. With one class of 
writers the human being is lost in the machinery. 
The others merely feel badly and pick out a few 
things to account for it. 



193 



RIGOURS OF EDUCATION 

VI 

INNER CIRCLES 

There was an inner circle, I understand, within 
which the late Professor Max Miiller was re- 
garded as a very cheap person. Your truly 
learned man looked on him as an epicure might 
look on a quick-lunch counter. No doubt his 
critics have taken the right measure of him. 
Truth for its own sake was not always the 
master of his motives. Yet he was to blame 
not for popularizing but for sometimes popu- 
larizing in the wrong way. Inner circles 
often lose sight of this difference, and 
throw out a member the minute they catch him 
meeting the world half way. Huxley is not 
thought much of in some inner circles, though 
the stimulus he gave probably did more for 
science in the long run than the labors of the 
very inmost and least intelligent drudge that 
ever snubbed a layman. It is well enough to 
distrust the general run of popularizers — the 
men who no sooner learn a commonplace of 
194 



RIGOURS OF EDUCATION 

science than they dilute it and pass it around — 
but to taboo a man merely because he has a word 
for us outsiders is hardly fair. People who have 
had anything to do with inner circles know them 
to be beset with awful spiritual dangers, of 
which a certain unworldly snobbery is not the 
least. "Here's to Mathematics ; may she never 
be prostituted to any human use." Shall a man 
dig all his days and still be in plain sight of the 
crowd? It is not for the like of us to hobnob 
with a scientist on the suface. It is enough to 
stand reverently at the mouth of the hole and 
know that Professor So-and-so went down thirty 
years ago and has never since been seen, or at 
most put an ear to the ground on the chance of 
hearing him root. It may be a necessary isola- 
tion, but sometimes it is not. That is the dark 
side of this question of the inner circle. 

There are degrees of technicality, and within 
certain limits there is a choice. Some of the least 
important members of the inner circle are the 
greatest sticklers for exclusiveness. They want 
to make the profanum vulgus scuttle at the sight 
195 



RIGOURS OF EDUCATION 

of them, and if they ever throw a word to a poor 
ignorant outside body it almost fells him to the 
earth. A recent writer on criminology, for ex- 
ample, has some common-sense ideas on the sub- 
ject of Lombroso's criminal type, holding that 
what Lombroso cited as marks of the criminal 
temperament were merely characteristics of the 
race and the social class to which the criminal 
belongs. But this is how the critic states his 
conclusion: "Thus each exceptional subject ac- 
centuates himself along lines of transmissible race 
eccentricities to which he alone proves true, and 
not to any exceptionally vague physio-psycholog- 
ical archetype." An enterprising sociologist 
will take the simplest kind of a notion, and so pile 
on the socio-politico, psycho-physico, zoo-biolog- 
ico, pseudo-scientific adjectives that no one will 
dare look for it. Scientific terms there must be, 
but why use them in speaking of familiar mat- 
ters for which plain words will do as well.? 
Whenever you can turn one of these tremendous 
socio-bio-psychical passages back into simple 
phrases without sacrificing the sense, it is a 
196 



RIGOURS OF EDUCATION 

pretty sure sign that science is not to blame for 
it, but the vices of the inner circle. To give 
another illustration from the science of crim- 
inology. Historical criminology, the writer tells 
us, "is bio-zoological in inception and detail, and 
historical as to data and outline, allying itself 
with predisposing causes inherent in the race and 
linking itself with primal conditions through a 
long chain of antecedent biological and anthro- 
pological sequences, following the well-known 
law of homogeneous to heterogeneous, but with 
ever-increasing distinctness." 

It is not science that makes a man write like 
this. It is the hauteur of the inner circle. The 
thought does not come to him in that way, and 
there is not the least need of these terrible words. 
Science puts up no barriers of preciosity. It 
is not the object of science that thought should 
baffle its pursuers, even though these pursuers be 
of low degree. It is the same old thing that 
Shakespeare and Moliere used to joke about. We 
hear little of it now, chiefly because there are no 
Shakespeares or Molieres to see the diff*erence 
197 



RIGOURS OF EDUCATION 

between truth for truth's sake and technicahty 
for the sake of the inner circle. It would do no 
harm if members of an inner circle were a little 
more tactful in dealing with the outsider. There 
are times when common humanity requires that 
a tomato shall be called a tomato, and not a 
Lycopersicum esculentum. That is all we mean, 
and it is no insult to science to say so. Mr. 
Darwin acted on that principle without losing 
caste. To that extent he was a popularizer, 
though he was as far removed from Professor 
Max Miiller as he was from the snobs of the 
arcanum or the ordinary young Eleusinian dude. 
Not to breathe a word against those good men 
who have worked so hard and specialized so long 
that they have forgotten the language. They 
have planted telegraph stations on the frontiers 
of science, but the wires are down and they can 
only make signs to their brethren. That is a 
matter of natural limitations, not of professional 
pedantry. But inner circles abound in euphuists 
who use words as if they were insignia of rank, 
queer little masters of ceremonies and court eti- 
198 



RIGOURS OF EDUCATION 

quette whose services to science are not worth the 
price of their humanity. They should take a 
course in Mother Goose. Bigger men than they 
have been quite generally understood. The 
native idiom is worth any man's while, and it is 
a mistake to assume that it is intended for liars 
alone. As to the popularizer, a democracy must 
have him ; but any neo-bio-psychical person who 
has never sinned against simpHcity is entitled to 
throw the first stone. 



199 



PART VI 

ON CERTAIN FORMS OF 
PEDANTRY 



THE DRIER CRITICISM 

There is a certain unfortunate class of persons 
who, whenever a new novel of any importance 
comes out, must fall to and examine it for germs 
and seeds and variations, and classify it accord- 
ing to purpose, structure and philosophic trend. 
Five or six of them broke out all at once not long 
ago, some of them writing books and others 
magazine articles. As a usual thing they have a 
theory of development to prove. One of them 
will tell you the exact relation between the modern 
novel and the mediaeval fabliaux, on what date 
the novel of purpose started, and how romanti- 
^00 



ON CERTAIN PEDANTRIES 

cism and realism alternately rose and fell. An- 
other proves by a hundred instances that the 
development of the novel follows the usual law 
of human expression, proceeding from the simple 
to the complex, the physical and external to the 
spiritual and invisible. A third says the whole 
thing is a department of biology, and is very 
enthusiastic about the study of hybridization and 
"that blending of slightly divergent individual- 
ities which takes place whenever a new genera- 
tion is launched." By these means, he says, you 
can explain Landor, Heine and Rossetti. Fancy 
leaving those three men unexplained. A fourth, 
who, though a woman, is made of the same stern 
stuff, has studied a thousand novels in which the 
story is told in the first person — "I-novels" she 
calls them, on the authority of Spielhagen's Ich- 
Roman — and is thus able to make some perfectly 
trustworthy generalizations. Her conclusion is 
that the structural importance of the narrator is 
a most noteworthy characteristic of the I-novel. 
This is what is known as the objective or 
scientific literary criticism. The dryness of it is 
^01 



ON CERTAIN PEDANTRIES 

the dry light of truth. No ordinary man dare 
question the facts or principles that it sets forth, 
for the learning and industry that go to make it 
are beyond all doubt. But there is one thing 
about it that must strike any one who now and 
then takes pleasure in a book. These people 
lose a good deal of fun. Perhaps they were never 
the kind of people to have fun ; but if they 
started with a capacity for it it certainly is all 
gone now. Books to them are not the means of 
enjoyment as we understand the term. They are 
just so much material to tabulate and classify. 
A new book, if it is good for anything, is merely 
a new job, and they are overworked already. 
They cannot simply read it, but must wearily in- 
quire (1) "What relation does it bear to other 
forms of human expression.''" (S) "What are its 
specific claims to eminence.?" and (3) "What 
tendencies does it markedly reveal.?" Where we 
common folk may go a-fishing they have to 
hold some kind of an ichthyological inquest. 
I do not mean that the scientific interest neces- 
sarily shuts out the other kind. Some men are 
^02 



ON CERTAIN PEDANTRIES 

big enough for both. But it happens that a good 
many of these scientific novel readers are not. 

You cannot attribute it altogether to the 
method. If a man's work leaves him with no more 
bowels than a logarithm it is likely he was not 
very well endowed at the start. Taine chased 
theories of development and betrayed the scien- 
tific motive in many ways. Yet his writings 
bore on them the distinctive marks of an indi- 
vidual mind. He had enthusiasm, prejudices and 
other human flaws. He caught the spirit of what 
he wrote about, and he was ten times as literary 
as he was biological. So he wrote literary criti- 
cism. You need not be an expert in structure, 
descent and hybridization to be a judge of books 
any more than you need be an anthropologist to 
be a judge of human nature. In the school of 
drier criticism anything like a pleasant intimacy 
with a book is unknown. It is as if one should 
come near enough to his friends only to ascertain 
what their facial angles were and whether they 
were dolichocephalic. And when you think over 
the books you like you will find that what these 
203 



ON CERTAIN PEDANTRIES 

scholiasts note in them are precisely the things 
that do not count. They are pleased (if we may 
apply the term pleasure to their scholarly emo- 
tion) by the resemblances, while it is the unlike- 
nesses that fascinate you, unless, perhaps, you 
mean to make your doctor's degree by a disserta- 
tion on the structural unity of the Ich-Roman. 
Yet it is a safe bit of practical advice to any man 
that if he has in his possession a book whose ele- 
ments can all be thoroughly classified and traced 
to their sources he should at once burn it. 

How does it happen that these men are on such 
formal, even strained relations with literature.? 
Perhaps there was a time when they liked it, but 
they had to teach it or show their knowledge of it, 
and a grim pedagogical sense of duty now drives 
them to their task. They bother with no ele- 
ment of it which they cannot thoroughly ex- 
plain. It is only the obvious that they are after. 
They are bound forever to the abominable drudg- 
ery of establishing an inductive basis for the well 
known. And literary criticism is not literary at 
all. It is compounded of science and system and 
evolution and ennui. 

204 



ON CERTAIN PEDANTRIES 

II 

PAINSTAKING ILLITERACY 

We are careless enough in our use of words, 
Heaven knows, but the efforts of a recent writer 
to set us right only make us hug our sins the 
tighter. He is a sarcastic person who is alter- 
nately amused and dismayed by the slips of other 
people. Here are some of the things that he 
considers slips. Speaking of someone who used 
a wrong word on a certain occasion, he says: 
"The incident occurred in a 'suburbs' of a large 
Pennsylvania city, but the people out there are 
calling it a 'suburb' yet." Again, on running 
across the expression "a case of horse sense" in a 
newspaper, he said he tried "to think of some 
instance where horse sense had ever been put up 
in a crate, box or other package that is usually 
understood to be a 'case.' " Another newspaper 
said something about the responsibility of editors 
in the conduct of their journals. Their conduct 
would be improved, he thought, if the editors 
"were more cautious in conduct-ing them." "The 
205 



ON CERTAIN PEDANTRIES 

government of the tongue" was another expres- 
sion that puzzled him, but after reading down 
the page he found that the author referred to 
the *^ govern-ing^' of the tongue. In conclusion, 
he says he has a notebook full of similar in- 
stances. 

There is no need of mentioning the man's 
name. He bore traces of respectability, and may 
have been already punished enough by a return- 
ing sense of shame. But could anything be 
worse? "Suburb" has been in good standing for 
hundreds of years before and since Milton wrote 
of "the suburb of their straw-built citadel." The 
pedant cannot forget his Latin primer and that 
"s" in "^^r&s." The race has chosen to forget. 
The race is always doing things to shock the 
pedant. As to "conduct" and "case," you would 
not suppose the long-established ambiguities of 
those two words could come as a surprise to any 
one. But here is an instance of it, and it finds its 
way into print. Suddenly it dawns on this man 
that "conduct" sometimes means something be- 
sides behavior, and that "case" does not always 
206 



ON CERTAIN PEDANTRIES 

refer to a packing box. He is ready at any time 
to crush a lawyer who speaks of his "conduct of 
a case" with a satirical inquiry as to whether he 
has in mind the demeanor of twenty-four bottles 
of beer. And why not "government of the 
tongue" as well as "government of colonial de- 
pendencies," or anything else? It would be ab- 
surd to say anything about this foolish matter if 
it did not represent the attitude of a rather for- 
midable class of persons. The fine flagrancy of 
this particular instance is, to be sure, somewhat 
exceptional in print, unless it be among the let- 
ters to the editor. But it is not at all unusual 
in conversation. In fact, nothing speaks so well 
for the kindly forbearance of the race as the 
number of these people and the large proportion 
of them that die natural deaths. 

If in talking with a man like this you said 
something about a "standpoint," he would ask 
you if you meant a "point of view." If you 
asked, "Is to-morrow Tuesday?" he would say, 
"To-morrow will he Tuesday." Some members 
of his family would probably pronounce "pretty" 
207 



ON CERTAIN PEDANTRIES 

to rhyme with "petty." All would no doubt take 
infinite pains to make "tyoors" of all their 
"tures," and if any of them were colloquial 
enough to say, "Don't you know," the "t" in 
"don't" would be spat out so earnestly that you 
would dodge. But "don't" and "can't" are con- 
cessions to the lax manners of the Anglo-Saxon 
race. "Do not you" is the thing for true refine- 
ment. It is a very gold toothpick of a phrase, a 
sort of literary pocket comb. 

The incorrect pedantries of conversation 
would fill many volumes. They are not the least 
among the numerous annoyances of education. 
For the verbal prig is something of a tyrant, 
and the triple-plate armor of his self-compla- 
cency makes him assassin-proof. There is no con- 
vincing him that his is a special case of illiteracy, 
all the worse for being so deliberately wrought 
out. His quarrel is with the luxuriance of the 
language. He hates the liberality of our en- 
dowment. The activities of words must be cur- 
tailed. They must be disembowelled, salted, 
skinned and dried. And if we unbend a little in 
208 



ON CERTAIN PEDANTRIES 

pronunciation or elide our words, as did the 
Greeks, or fall in with the sanctioned careless- 
ness of the leaders of our race, he is for keeping 
us in after school. He is a cold-blooded disin- 
heritor of words, an apostle of rigidity and a 
traitor to the best traditions a people has. The 
language needs no beadle — not even on the Bow- 
ery. Order is not maintained by these trivial re- 
straints. They incite, rather, to open rebellion 
aU along the line. 



ON CERTAIN PEDANTRIES 

III 

THE HAND OF PROVIDENCE 

Here is a thoughtful and apparently pious 
writer who is disturbed by what he calls the 
naturalistic method of interpreting history, 
meaning by this the reference of great historical 
movements to natural causes. It seems to him 
that Providence is not receiving his fair share of 
credit for what has come to pass. "Has the bark 
of human civilization sailed so swiftly and pros- 
perously without a steersman?" he asks. He in- 
stances the Greeks. Suppose they had been 
placed in Scandinavia or Iceland, "would not 
their genius have been wholly wasted.?" and 
Rome — placed "just in the precise situation 
where it had the greatest scope for the exercise 
of its gifts." Then the timeliness of certain men 
and things. Philip and Alexander "appeared 
precisely at the fitting moment in Greek and 
Macedonian history" ; Rome's power developed at 
exactly the right time, late enough to avoid in- 
terfering with the original culture of Greece, 
210 



ON CERTAIN PEDANTRIES 

early enough to be on hand for the administra- 
tion of the east; the fall of the eastern empire 
"was timed with the nicety of clockwork, to take 
place at the very hour when it could unfailingly 
give rise" to certain momentous consequences ; 
and race after race were constantly appearing 
on the stage at the "precise period when they 
were required." There is much more to the same 
effect. 

What can a man be thinking of to tax his- 
torians or anybody else with remissness in this 
respect ? As if we lacked for human explanation 
of the plans of Providence ! It is about the most 
copious thing in the language. Our school books 
on history are full of it, and as to the hand of 
Providence in current politics, there is hardly an 
orator who is not versed in this colossal palmis- 
try. If Mr. Bryan had been elected, would there 
not have been hundreds to show the hand of 
Providence running through all creation with a 
Populistic plan ? If the better class of historians 
to-day say less about the hand of Providence 
than their predecessors it is a thing to be thank- 
211 



ON CERTAIN PEDANTRIES 

ful for. It argues a becoming modesty and a 
kindlier view of the intelligence of their readers. 
The method followed by the writer I have quoted 
is common enough. Great Britain and Russia, 
he says, are to be the main channels through 
which the civilization of Europe is to be spread 
over most of the world. This was in the plan, 
and if anything in the past had turned out 
differently it would have spoilt the whole scheme. 
Under other conditions England could never 
have become the powerful state she is. He adds : 

"Familiar facts are always liable to be taken 
as matters of course, and the fact that England 
is an island is one of these. But if we consider 
the physical causes which have made the island, 
we shall perceive how easily everything might 
have been other than it is. The narrow strait 
that separates France and England is geologi- 
cally of recent origin, and it is not, so to speak, 
a permanent feature. . . . The elevation of the 
land is very moderate and ... a slight further 
depression would leave only a few scattered 
mountain islets of these kingdoms. Again the 
situation was exactly the right one. Farther 
south, off the coast of Spain or north or west in 
the Atlantic, the history must have been wholly 
different." 

212 



ON CERTAIN PEDANTRIES 

There is no stopping these people when the 
wondering fit is on them. Providence, to their 
minds, is always having hairbreadth escapes. 
Suppose Remus had killed Romulus. Remus, be- 
ing a difFerent sort of man, might not have 
founded the city. There would have been no 
Roman empire, and the face of history would 
have been changed. The thing is endless. The 
best way is not to begin, or if there must be 
speculation about what would have changed the 
face of history, to do it all up at once by suppos- 
ing there were no human race at all. Why try 
and catalogue all the things that did not happen? 
Surely Providence was no more thoughtful when 
he made Great Britain of just the right size and 
shape than when he made men right side up. 
Yet writers who would never think of marvelling 
at the beneficent design that kept us from going 
through hfe head downwards feel the deepest 
emotion because the Angles and Saxons did not 
take ship for Patagonia, and the Greeks were 
not exposed to a set of influences that would have 
turned them out Dutchmen. Some writers go 
2W 



ON CERTAIN PEDANTRIES 

almost as deep in this philosophy as their Mother 
Goose prototype — "if the moon were made of 
green cheese, and the sea were made of ink." It 
is almost an automatic philosophy and the least 
shove makes its wheels go round. For what is it 
but the proclamation of the present as the 
product of the past and the damnation of a lot 
of might-have-beens that you invent yourself? 

Besides, it is bad manners to be constantly 
praising Providence because he knew what he 
was about. Some things should be taken for 
granted. It was meant that man should walk, 
but he need not be forever thanking Heaven for 
putting legs on him, though these legs are ad- 
justed "with the nicety of clockwork" and are 
as neat an adaptation of means to end as the 
appearance of Julius Cffisar just in the nick of 
time and the planting of the Phoenicians by the 
seashore. There is no sense in selecting just one 
set of things to compliment. Nor does the plan 
need any apologists. And it is a merciful thing 
that we know less than they do about the plot, 
since we are bound to read the story. The moon 
214 



ON CERTAIN PEDANTRIES 

was still there, though the donkey drank it up in 
the puddle. And it is the same way with the 
mystery when it has been all cleared up or cut 
and dried by the people who know about Provi- 
dence. 



215 



ON CERTAIN PEDANTRIES 

IV 

NOTHING NEW 

A YOUNG literary student, rushing bravely along 
a well-worn path, has referred in a learned essay 
to the great antiquity of new ideas, quoting, of 
course, the proverb about the lack of novelty 
under the sun and citing, like all the rest, his 
modern instances. What did Darwin do but un- 
fold the thought of the ancient Heraclitus, and 
what would John Stuart Mill have been without 
Hippias of Keos? Nietzsche's philosophy came 
straight from oriental antiquity via Aristotle 
and Carlyle, and Poe's "Raven" was written 
twenty centuries ago by Kia Yi, the Chinaman, 
and Ruskin spoke up for the manual arts because 
St. Paul was a tentmaker. Every respectable 
thought, like every valuable trotting horse, has 
its pedigree. And yet readers still persist in 
looking for novelty and writers are apparently 
able to supply it. Why is this? asked the stu- 
dious writer, the veins on his young brow standing 
out like whipcords. It is to be explained, he 
216 



ON CERTAIN PEDANTRIES 

thinks, by the fact that the ideas, though old, are 
often forgotten. This quest for originality, he 
concludes, is not a bad thing, and the French 
critic who called it the "worst disease of our 
time" was wrong. 

Now the ins and outs of this matter do not con- 
cern us every-day people at all. It is essentially 
the collegiate view of literature, and springs from 
the necessity of saying to young men the sort 
of things that they could pass an examination in. 
Passing an examination in the pedigree of the 
central thoughts of great authors seems a hid- 
eous thing to most of us alumni. To be learned 
in literature is such a different thing from liking 
it. It is characteristic of these discussions to 
leave out the one thing we care about ; that is, 
the distinctive, personal marks by which we can 
tell men apart. "A writer must know how to 
write. This is in a sense the very first condition 
of success. But so far as the present discussion 
is concerned, this phase of the question must be 
left entirely aside," etc. And, mercy on us, what 
remains? Why, a grouping of great central 
^17 



ON CERTAIN PEDANTRIES 

ideas, whereby Darwin looks like the twin brother 
of Heraclitus and Kia Yi and Poe are indistin- 
guishable, and St. Paul is mixed up with Ruskin, 
and Plato leads Marie Corelli by the hand. For 
literary purposes it is better to classify men by 
their noses than by their great central ideas. 

Apply this test of novelty to Tolstoi's message 
to the American people during the war with 
Spain. The thoughts on the nationalization of 
land are Henry George's ; the doctrine that prop- 
erty is robbery is Proudhon's ; the plea for the 
socialization of the means of production is an 
echo of commonplace socialist manifestoes; and 
every one of these notions is not only familiar 
but flattened out and dog-eared by thousands of 
ilHterate thumbs. Then there is his reference 
to the paganization of Christianity, which is 
fully described in the books, and his appeal to 
the primitive and uncorrupted Christianity, 
which is the foundation stone of about every new 
sect that is started and the substance of more 
sermons than you could count. Not much would 
be left of the originality of Tolstoi after a text 
S18 



ON CERTAIN PEDANTRIES 

book of the drier criticism had duly classified 
his thoughts. Yet somehow he is new enough to 
startle and true enough to make you forget his 
errors and impossibilities and the genealogy of 
his general notion is the last thing you care 
about. This is for the scholars of the drier crit- 
icism, who of all the chapters of inspiration like 
best the first of Matthew: "And Zorobabel be- 
gat Abiud; and Abiud begat Eliakim; and 
Eliakim begat Azor ; and Azor begat Sadoc." 

The blessed thing about this world is that, 
however old the general notions may be, some of 
the people in it are new, and they have a way of 
saying and doing things the like of which you 
would swear you never saw before. And you 
never did. For no formula ever yet told the 
whole story, and no man ever yet felt and spoke 
the truth without creating it, and no work of art 
that was worth anything could ever help being 
novel. What a disagreeable job it must be, this 
classifying of books according to a principle by 
which you cannot even tell whether they are real 
books or not. How much of Zola can be found 
219 



ON CERTAIN PEDANTRIES 

in Zoroaster? — compare the good and evil of 
Zola's trilogy with Ahriman and Ormuzd. It is 
a terrible industry. Why not own up that 
books, like people, do not make friends in this 
way? Powerfully disagreeable people may have 
your own general notion, and if a man and his 
wife stood on precisely the same platform of 
principle they would be a most wonderful and un- 
comfortable pair. By the time literature is made 
ready for the classroom, with all its elements ex- 
plained, what is left of it? The lecturer has 
descended upon his subject like the tortoise that 
the eagle dropped on iEschylus's bald head. 



220 



ON CERTAIN PEDANTRIES 



LITERARY ANALYSIS 

An author, like a bicycle, ought not to be taken 
to pieces by people that do not understand the 
business. In a recent paper an American novel- 
ist is analyzed by a French critic, and when the 
thing is done all the king's horses and all the 
king's men couldn't put that novelist together 
again. His most admiring friends would not 
recognize these colossal sections as fragments of 
his being. There is a good deal of this kind of 
analysis going on in the literary journals, and it 
is sometimes as irritating as certain jointed fish- 
ing rods in wet weather. It is a common thing to 
take some minor literary man and divide him up 
as neatly as if he were a stick of chewing gum 
already half cut through with grooves and then 
give his qualities such big names that when re- 
combined they would build Julius Caesar. There 
is a lavishness of language at these times that 
leaves nothing over against the day when the 
critic may run across a man of real significance. 
221 



ON CERTAIN PEDANTRIES 

Besides "virile fascination," the critic finds in 
this harmless novelist philosophies and trends of 
thought and social dogmas and Zeitgeists beyond 
all count or measure. 

Now, the truth is the philosophy of this au- 
thor, or of any other literary man of equal rank, 
matters very little, and if we had a label and a 
pigeon-hole for every section of his intellect we 
should be none the richer. The great point is 
how well he knows his art. One reason why lit- 
erary criticism is so unfruitful in this day is that 
it insists on grubbing among these irrelevant 
matters. It does not say of a man. Granting his 
premises, is the thing well done.'' but What are 
his premises? For what great principles does 
he stand .f' I have known a poem to be con- 
demned because its political economy was wrong, 
and a novel to be placed on a pinnacle because its 
author was a Populist at heart. What has this 
to do with literary analysis? Chemical analysis 
would be as much in place. This is the spirit 
that makes such dreary schoolmen of our critics. 
They ransack an author for his moral purpose. 



ON CERTAIN PEDANTRIES 

They rattle off his qualities as a palmist tells 
jour character. They weigh his work by politi- 
cal science, psychology and social economics. 
They could grade each part of him on the scale 
of ten like a schoolboy's recitation. And they 
think this scientific thumbing is literary analysis. 
The man's power to please, his skill in that cu- 
rious magic we call art, the only thing that mat- 
ters, is left out. 

There was poor old Ruskin. Suppose we 
judged him by this standard, what would be left 
of him? No man could count the blunders that 
he made. He built on false premises, reasoned 
like a child, painted as if he were a political 
economist, taught political economy as if he were 
a painter. Yet on that cracked and battered in- 
strument of his he somehow managed to play a 
tune that will sing in men's ears so long as there 
is leisure left for music. Our Alexandrians know 
this, too ; but a man has to be dead or shelved for 
many years before they act on it. For living 
authors they have a different test. They judge 
them by their creeds or schools or party plat- 



ON CERTAIN PEDANTRIES 

forms, by anything except their power to write. 
They would have us believe that it is a matter of 
supreme importance what Mr. Kipling thinks of 
England's imperial mission, what are M. Zola's 
views of heredity, where Mr. Howells stands on 
social questions, and whether Mrs. Humphry 
Ward is sound in economics, and they go on an- 
alyzing deeper and deeper, like a dog at an 
empty woodchuck hole. And when it is all said 
and done we merely learn that in addition to 
some artistic work that gives us pleasure these 
writers have produced some text-book matter of 
an indifferent sort. Some superfluous didactic 
stuff that we do not much care for has been 
thrown in, and this is what the analyst fishes out 
as if it were the one precious thing. Perhaps 
the authors think so, too, but notoriously they 
love their worst works best. 

A man may be almost crazy and still write 
well. Some excellent ones have been, in fact, 
maniacal. He may be the soundest, sanest, best- 
informed of all his race and fail completely. He 
may have all the gifts or just this one. Scoun- 



ON CERTAIN PEDANTRIES 

drels and saints and sages, sometimes fools, have 
all contributed to literature. It is with the qual- 
ity which they have in common that literary 
analysis is alone concerned. And if you would 
see a writer at his worst take him when his phi- 
losophy is uppermost. The worst thing that M. 
Zola ever wrote is Dr. Pascal, which gave a mas- 
terly summing up of his philosophy. The dark- 
est days of Mr. Kipling have been those on which 
purpose got the better of him. One sleeps most 
soundly when the social philosopher in Mr. How- 
ells is most wide awake. Yet all this is the 
special field of current literary analysis. The 
chief harm it does is in misleading the subject of 
the analysis. The author is encouraged to chase 
strange gods. As for the rest of us, if there 
were nothing more in literature than these men 
dream of, we should be reading text-books if we 
read at all. 



2^5 



ON CERTAIN PEDANTRIES 

VI 

OUTDOOR PEDANTRY 

Nature-lovers have found their way into print 
with rather unusual frequency of late and every 
little while a reviewer has had to dispose of a 
dozen volumes or so of their publications all at 
once. The success of this kind of writing is a 
healthy sign and ought to be a comfort to the 
prophets of decay as indicating that there are a 
few sound spots left in us. A people cannot be 
far removed from innocence when books of this 
sort are widely read and when even the daily 
newspapers drop wars and politics, as they some- 
times do, for a wholly irrelevant editorial rhap- 
sody on cock-robin or autumn leaves. The Lon- 
don papers, especially, are given to these rustic 
interludes. Some time ago one of our magazines 
gathered up the names of our outdoor writers 
and published an article on them. It is a good 
showing so far as numbers are concerned. There 
are more "rambles" and "bird-notes" than you 
would ever have supposed, and, if reviewers are 
226 



ON CERTAIN PEDANTRIES 

to be believed, they are all written in the most 
charming style. But reviewers are not to be 
believed. No one ought to take time for many of 
these books if there are passages of Thoreau 
which he has not yet learned by heart. These 
writers are serviceable only when they give infor- 
mation. As interpreters they are of no use. For 
this business we must still rely on the masters, 
and how few of them there are! The real gift 
was imparted to a handful so that we should not 
be tied to our indoor libraries. Providence or- 
dained that most of their works should fit into a 
knapsack. 

A clergyman goes a-fishing and comes home 
well browned and ten pounds fatter. So he sits 
down and writes a book full of trite compliments 
to nature interspersed with a good deal of self- 
congratulation. He lays claim to the most re- 
fined and exquisite emotion you ever heard of — 
not one particle of which he succeeds in passing 
along. He says he found "sermons in stones, 
books in the running brooks" (it is a pity Shake- 
speare ever wrote the thing), but you get no ink- 
%%1 



ON CERTAIN PEDANTRIES 

ling of what they were. And because it is a good 
sort of thing for a clergyman to do and shows 
a fine appetite for wholesome fare the critics are 
absurdly easy on him. "Such a subtle sym- 
pathy with nature in her varying moods," they 
say. How do they know he has it? Just because 
he swears he has. So they run him in with a 
dozen others whom they are praising and tell us 
we must not "neglect the lessons that are to be 
gained from so charming an assortment of books 
as have been provided for summer instruction and 
entertainment." There is no question of the 
man's sincerity or of the worth of what he writes 
about, but unfortunately these two are not the 
only elements of good writing. Here is a beau- 
tiful object, and there a genuine admirer. Yet 
the net result of bringing them together may be 
merely twaddle so far as a third person is con- 
cerned. The critics forget this. All the world 
loves a lover, but it usually runs away from him 
when he talks. And so it is with some of the 
people who make such an ado about nestling in 
nature's bosom. 



ON CERTAIN PEDANTRIES 

It is a rare man who can be agreeably articu- 
late in these matters. They are hardly more com- 
municable in speech than music is. Yet there 
are many who will bully you for not making the 
attempt or for not being deeply interested in the 
attempts of others. Some of these books are full 
of a sort of outdoor snobbishness, an air of hav- 
ing an especially fine make of soul and being 
proud of it. The writer will pity people who 
do not penetrate this or that of nature's secrets 
or participate in certain intimate joys. As if a 
few banalities about a rhododendron were an evi- 
dence of spiritual good form ! And he will tell 
you what these things do for him — how they 
strengthen him and uplift him and keep his 
heart pure and his mind clear. "I am a part of 
nature and nature is a part of me. Tear us 
apart, and nature is robbed and I am ruined." 
It may be true, but there should be some other 
evidence than his word for it. It is indelicate to 
be forever harping on nature's partiality for 
you. To the open-air pharisee, half the fun of 
it is in the feeling that there are so few like him. 
229 



ON CERTAIN PEDANTRIES 

You cannot fancy his enjoying a thing quietly 
and for itself, but taking notes on each emotion 
in order to write it up afterward ostentatiously. 
How much of it is delight in objective nature and 
how much is satisfaction with the trim little in- 
tellectual outfit he surveys her with? Yet if 
there is one lesson she is supposed to din into 
every one who comes close enough it is humility. 
In England there are signs that in certain 
highly respectable magazines and newspapers 
Nature is even worse treated than with us. Ap- 
parently they have a staff correspondent whom 
they never let indoors — a literary bird-dog for 
whom the house is no place. If they catch him 
in the ofBce they shoo him out with the broom to 
flush some small game for the next number. I 
gather from one of them that "the winter wind, 
unlike the entrancing night breezes of summer, 
is one of the few sounds that please even more 
when listened to indoors than out. ... It 
sighs in the chimney, it moans round the walls ; 
it whistles sometimes, at others it roars." From 
another I have learned that as a result of the bad 
230 



ON CERTAIN PEDANTRIES 

weather of the week before the birds were "thor- 
oughly worn out and uncomfortable," and "went 
to bed an hour before their time," though some 
of the partridges may have sat up somewhat 
longer. Some say it is the Englishman's love of 
nature, and would have you think it spontaneous. 
It is nothing of the sort. It is a clear case of 
compulsion. The wretches hate what they write 
of in nine cases out of ten. You can tell that 
from their style, and it is a pity they should be 
so tormented. Why try and squeeze a great, 
wild, forest joy out of a little cockney heart.? 

How the sense of obligation in this matter has 
increased. You could follow Thackeray's fancy 
in a cab. Dickens, though the sense of locality 
was as strong in him as in a cat, used nature only 
to emphasize pathos or punctuate joy. To Bul- 
wer all outdoors was only stage carpentry and 
paint. Nowadays the least essay or short story 
must be trimmed with conventionalized scraps of 
nature, like a woman's hat. Once if a writer did 
not wish to do it he did not have to try ; but there 
is no getting out of it in these days, and the 
231 



ON CERTAIN PEDANTRIES 

rarest gift of the generations is aped by every 
one who writes. We, too, have our hypocrites 
who go and live among the pine trees in order 
that they may afterward lie about the thoughts 
they had there — Fourteenth Street imaginations 
struggling with the great north woods. But 
venal Yankees though we are, we have not yet 
established outdoor clerkships like these British 
magazines. To be sure, in the pages of most of 
our novelists the sunrise is a memory of insomnia, 
and Pan wears a high hat, but the feeling for 
nature is not so dead in us that we turn her over 
to regular correspondents for the daily press. 
As countrymen of Thoreau, it will be some time 
before we are ready for those weekly letters about 
the "wren so full of jollity and the redbreast so 
companionable to man." Occasionally, per- 
haps ; once a month if we go on sinking ; but not 
once a week, unless we have a crop of geniuses. 
For you might as well require a weekly epic 
or a weekly tragedy in blank verse. There is no 
middle class in this kind of writing, and no pos- 
sibility of making over the unfit. Only queer 



ON CERTAIN PEDANTRIES 

effects come from the attempt, such as those of 
a serious young romancer of Indiana who de- 
scribed a yellow sunset in terms of custard pie. 
Better an equal quantity of zoology or botany 
with all the technical terms than this constrained 
recourse to nature with poetical intent. The 
man of whom it was written: 

Primroses on the river's brim. 
Dicotyledons were to him, 
And they were nothing more, 

was at least honest, and might have done better 
at natural description than any literary man of 
merely secondary inspiration. The writers above 
quoted should, if they behave themselves, be al- 
lowed indoors, for that is evidently where their 
heart is, and not in the highlands a-chasing the 
deer. 



ON CERTAIN PEDANTRIES 

VII 

A POPULARIZER 

The Life and Letters of Huxley show clearly the 
worry and grief that he caused his friends by 
pausing so often in the search for truth to spread 
the knowledge of it. Stick to pure science, dig 
deeper, let the world alone, and, above all, keep 
out of rows — ^that was the spirit of most of their 
advice to him. But having rather more than his 
share of human nature, and having also a mind 
which he justly described as "constructed on the 
high-pressure tubular-boiler principle," he kept 
bobbing up on the surface of the earth to set 
matters straight there. By thus dividing his 
time he may have spoiled his chance as a special- 
ist, whose post mortem nimbus, I understand, is 
not apt to last unless the man is sunk in the 
monograph. They say he will be forgotten be- 
cause he tried to do two things for truth — first 
find it and then get it accepted. Had he tried 
only one thing we might remember him, as long, 
say, as Charles the Fat or Didius Julianus. But 



ON CERTAIN PEDANTRIES 

whatever trick time may play on him — and we 
know very well that some of the silliest names live 
the longest — it does not seem now as if his 
friends need have worried so. For the present 
at least we believe he did as much for the world 
as the best of them. 

In a specialist's heaven he may not have a high 
seat. Some of the brief biological reviews of the 
century barely noticed him, and one of them ig- 
nores altogether the work with which his name is 
identified. But measuring greatness by depth 
of research is not wholly satisfactory, since there 
are other ways of serving the truth than by dig- 
ging for it. If a man can popularize without 
cheapening, if he can find for the law and the 
cause precisely the words for them, it is hard to 
see why he should be shut out from the best so- 
ciety in our graveyards. And that was where 
Huxley's talent lay — not in cutting the truth to 
fit current demands nor in diluting it, but in 
stripping it for action that it might the sooner 
prevail. He was for hurrying things up, and he 
did hurry them up, perhaps, by a generation. An 



ON CERTAIN PEDANTRIES 

impatient propounder is sometimes as good for 
the health of the world as a patient investiga- 
tor. He believed that the better the cause the 
better should be the expression of it, so he pegged 
away till he found the words that would carry it 
farthest. Thus he became a popularizer, but in 
a different sense from the type of man who makes 
little journeys into science in order to peddle 
what he finds there, different even from the late 
Max Miiller, if we may trust the critics, since 
that worthy man seems sometimes to have con- 
founded truth with confectionery. But the 
specialists are very severe, and likely as not they 
will dock a man's glory for the time he lost in 
fighting their battles for them. It seems a pity 
in Huxley's case. It was such a splendid and 
honorable truancy. He may have served 
science as well by living among men as if he 
had spent his whole life among the Labyrintho- 
donts. 

Most popularizers being of the other sort, the 
whole breed bears a bad name among specialists, 
as if the knowledge of things must be forever 
236 



ON CERTAIN PEDANTRIES 

divorced from the ability to say them. Mr. Mor- 
ley was censured not long ago for writing a 
readable work on history. It was true and well 
done, said his critic, but it wasted time that should 
have been spent in searching for facts. Just how 
much of the man must be filed away in making 
the specialist.? Huxley or Bagehot, or even 
Macaulay, is a better example for a democratic 
age than Dr. Casaubon. For while the learned 
are gathering their private hoards, a lot of de- 
based coin is circulating. Suppose economic 
science to-day should find its Huxley. He would 
carry it as far as the doctrines of Henry George 
or the Marxists. As much has been done in the 
last fifty years as in the fifty before them, but 
Smith and Ricardo and Bastiat and Mill knew 
how to state it. We have as many good reser- 
voirs of thought, but less irrigation. A man may 
be a Bryanite with ridiculous impunity ; yet evo- 
lution should be no easier to teach than common 
sense about the currency. For that reason the 
artistic clubbing that Huxley gave the enemy 
may place him as high in the world's esteem 
237 



ON CERTAIN PEDANTRIES 

as if he had stayed in his laboratory, there 
being a need of the very part he accused himself 
of playing, that "of something between maid-of- 
all-work and gladiator-general for Science." 



PART VII 

MINOR OPPRESSIONS 

I 

THE SUMMER EXPERIMENT 

The family will soon be coming back, and there 
is about an even chance that the head of it will 
announce her firm determination never to go to 
that place again. Trying new places is a matter 
of hazard save for the rich, whose choice is un- 
restricted, and the fatuous, who are happy any- 
where. The rest are likely to blunder in and out 
of summer places, engaging prison cells in ad- 
vance and facing dreadful odds in the matter of 
food. There is naturally a large proportion of 
failures. The unlucky ones may, as the seasons 
roll past, exchange discomforts at the seaside for 
2Sd 



MINOR OPPRESSIONS 

pain among the hills, but while there are degrees 
of failure, they seldom report anything like a 
positive success. Wounds heal in the winter and 
hope springs up again in May, showing itself 
first in a conviction that there "must be nice 
places if you only knew," and later in a willing- 
ness to believe lies. And the lies gather thick 
and fast, coming not only from their natural 
sources, but from people with whom your rela- 
tions had been of the kindest and from friends 
whom you had always supposed stanch and true. 
Their worst treachery is in that matter of the 
food. The lies about the people do not matter 
so much, because as time goes on one learns the 
ratio of "charming people" to the rest of the 
population. Buoyant natures find nests of them 
wherever they go, but experience has chastened 
most of us into a reasoned calculation of chances 
and we know how seldom "charming people" are 
found in coveys, the keenest sportsman being 
lucky if he can flush two of them in a year. But 
the hope of good food constantly renews itself. 
The mind is eager to believe, and the beginning 
240 



MINOR OPPRESSIONS 

of each season finds us as trustful as a little child. 
Not a great variety, says the betrayer, but on the 
whole an excellent table; good, plain, sensible, 
simple, hearty, wholesome, nourishing things, 
and plenty of them, at which the castigated pulse 
gives the same old foolish wallop every year. 
Good meats and vegetables, fresh eggs and fault- 
less butter, the full menu of a fool's paradise, 
and under the spur of an excited imagination the 
contract is signed. Shall we never learn the 
worthlessness of other people's views of food? 
There is no authoritative body of comment on 
food. Like all the deeper personal problems of 
life, you must face it alone. A chance acquaint- 
ance is no more fitted to decide for you a ques- 
tion of butter than to pick you out a wife. It is 
not a matter of absolute merit, but an intimate 
and personal affair, and the butter which in- 
vites him daily for three months may seem to 
you to breathe a curse. It no more supplies a 
universal criterion than mother's love, the worst 
case of butter ever known being no doubt some- 
body's darling, as you might say. 
241 



MINOR OPPRESSIONS 

Lying on the one hand, and credulity and a 
total disregard of personal equations on the 
other, account for many failures in experimental 
summering. To be sure, there is Nature, and we 
admit that the life is more than food and the 
body than raiment, but even a poet would be bet- 
ter if he had better things inside him — "so might 
he, standing on this pleasant lea, have glimpses 
that would make him less forlorn." And the 
family must take a different view of Nature from 
either the poet or the woodsman and place a limit 
on her compensations. If it did not, it would not 
live to grow up. Hardships go with a wild, free 
life, hunting grizzlies and the like of that, but 
the family are doing nothing of the sort. So it 
seems illogical that they should fare like moose- 
hunters in the mountain boarding-house or be 
treated like old salts in the hotel by the sea. 
They argue with a show of reason that they 
ought not to be pelted with all the hardships of 
the wild, free life when they are not leading it. 
But landlords often reason differently, holding 
that where Nature does so much for the family 



MINOR OPPRESSIONS 

less is required of the bill of fare. These are 
some of the things that sometimes bring back the 
family after the summer experiment with stern 
lines showing beneath the tan. 



US 



MINOR OPPRESSIONS 

II 

THE PEOPLE NEXT DOOR 

Outwardly you may be on friendly terms with 
the people next door, but, if the truth were 
known, you do not think much of them. Their 
ways may be well enough, but they are not your 
ways. It is not hatred, far less envy ; neither is 
it contempt exactly. Only you do not under- 
stand why they live as they do. You account 
for some things by the differences in social 
traditions. They were not brought up 
as you were — not that they are to blame 
for that, but certain advantages that you 
had were denied them. Rude noises come from 
that house next door that you would not expect 
from people in their station. There is nothing 
that so reveals the breeding of the inmates as the 
noises that come from a house. Laughter late 
at night, when you want to sleep — how coarse it 
sounds! That is what the strong writer prob- 
ably means by ribald laughter. Then there is 
that young woman who sings. What voices the 
244 



MINOR OPPRESSIONS 

people next door always have, and what a reper- 
toire of songs! Why do they never try a new 
one? There must be new songs from time to 
time within the means of any one, but you never 
hear them next door. Years after a song is for- 
gotten elsewhere it goes on next door. A popular 
song never dies. The people next door rescue it 
after it is hounded off the street and warm it into 
eternal life. Girls begin on it in their teens and 
worry it away on into womanhood. Even after 
they are married off they do not get over it, and 
when they come home to visit you hear it again — 
"Eyes so balloo and tender," or whatever it may 
be. Fancy the kind of people that would let a 
young woman sing "Eyes so balloo and tender" 
all through life, even if she wanted to. It must 
injure her mind. 

And so it goes. Everything they do shows 
just what sort of people they are. Look at the 
things they hang out in their back yard — and 
is there ever a day when some of their old traps 
are not hanging out or standing around there.? 
If your things looked like that you would at 
^45 



MINOR OPPRESSIONS 

least keep them indoors. It is not that they are 
so old, though for the matter of that you should 
think they would be afraid of germs, but they 
were chosen with such monstrously bad taste in 
the first place. What in the world do people want 
to furnish a house with things like that for? 
They must have cost enough, too, and for that 
amount of money they could have bought — but 
what is the use of talking? There are distinc- 
tions that you never can make people feel. 

That cook of theirs you would not have in 
your house five minutes. It must surely be un- 
safe to eat what a person like that would cook. 
A certain degree of neatness is indispensable, 
and people who were used to things would insist 
upon it. That is the trouble with the people 
next door — ^they are not used to things. It is 
easy enough to put a stop to certain matters if 
you take them in hand, such, for instance, as 
those awful Irish whoops that issue every even- 
ing from their kitchen windows. But the people 
next door do not mind — that is the sum of it — 
they simply do not mind things that would drive 
246 



MINOR OPPRESSIONS 

you stark mad. They can sleep through their 
own hideous noise, eat their own ill-prepared 
food, put up with anything, just because it is 
theirs. Content is a good thing and family af- 
fection is laudable, but in this particular case 
each goes too far. It annoys you to think of the 
narrow basis on which it subsists. What can the 
wife see in the husband or the husband in the 
wife, or either of them in those young ones ? 

Yesterday a correspondent wrote to a news- 
paper complaining of the carpet beating that 
went on next door. Hitherto he had thought 
those people were gentlefolk. He doubts it now. 
The people next door are always doing things 
that enable you to "size them up." You size 
them up ten or fifteen times a day. The women 
in your family size them up much of tener. That 
doubt of next-door gentility is universal. It is 
no accident that brings that kind of people next 
door to you. It is the working of a mighty so- 
cial law. You are charitable in the matter. You 
admit their virtues — that is, the big ones, which 
nobody uses more than once a year. They are 

U7 



MINOR OPPRESSIONS 

respectable people and well-intentioned. But 
they always lack one indefinable thing which you 
have, whatever may be your faults. It is very 
important. The social plane always slants down 
toward the people next door. One should not be 
snobbish about it, but the slant is there, neverthe- 
less, and you cannot help knowing it. If we 
created a nobility over here the people next door 
could never get in. If you ever mention these 
things you do so with the utmost delicacy and 
you explain over and over again that you do not 
mean anything against the people. You would 
not for the world let them know you felt as you 
do. This is all wasted. This is the land of sub- 
jective aristocracy. 



248 



MINOR OPPRESSIONS 

III 

THE CHEERFUL GIVER 

The "economic man," that bloodless hero of 
scientific fiction, will drop out of sight in a few 
days, and personal property will be flying about 
in wild disregard of the ordinary laws of ex- 
change. Christmas must have been a bad time 
for the old school of economists. It must have 
struck them as a sort of saturnalia of benevo- 
lence, a period of economic anarchy when capital 
flowed into pendent stockings instead of its most 
productive channels, and enlightened self-inter- 
est was not admitted into decent society. It took 
the starch out of logic and scandalized some very 
respectable premises. It was an annual reminder 
of the world's complexity and the difficulty of 
putting all humanity into a few neat proposi- 
tions. Most of this particular group of doctrin- 
aires have since died off*, some of them of a broken 
heart, it is said. The suspension of the economic 
law of grab and the suspicion that that cheer- 
ful philosophy is not always applicable does not 
249 



MINOR OPPRESSIONS 

trouble us any more. In fact, in our reaction 
against it, at this season we think it is a virtue to 
suspend common sense and to treat givers as if 
they were above all laws of reason. This is a mis- 
take. The superb ethical position of the giver 
may be abused. The adages in regard to him 
need revision. That one about looking the gift 
horse in the mouth makes him careless and some- 
times injurious, and the statement that the Lord 
loves a cheerful giver needs qualification. Peo- 
ple will do idiotic things in the cheerf uUest kind 
of way. 

The gaucheries of givers are very saddening, 
and say what you will, gratitude is the most 
practical minded of all the virtues. A few years 
ago Lord Kitchener gave the queen an iron-gray 
donkey twelve hands high and with ears a foot 
long, and the Duchess of Cumberland received 
from him a like token of regard at the same time, 
though, as befitted her lower station, her donkey 
was much smaller than the queen's. Lord Kitche- 
ner is a blunt, soldierlike person, and nothing of 
a ladies' man, and the Soudan is a wretched place 
^50 



MINOR OPPRESSIONS 

to shop in. But there would be no excuse even 
for him if he were in London within range of 
feminine counsel and should allow his Christmas 
good will to take the form of sending donkeys 
to all the women of his acquaintance. Yet that 
is just the sort of thing some people are always 
doing, and we are told that it is a sin not to beam 
on them afterward. Think of their warm hearts ? 
You can't do it — at least not until your first fine 
rage is spent. Take the silver-plated ice pitcher 
abuse for example. It is not very common now, 
but there was a time when groups of benevolent 
persons organized behind a man's back and gave 
him a great gleaming water tank that would 
yield its contents only to the mighty. Corporate 
kindness always took the forms of an ice pitcher 
or a gold-headed cane. No one ever thought of 
anything else. This was because givers were 
not taught to think at all. They had only to be 
cheerful. The recipient did the thinking in 
these instances — a hard, blighted kind of think- 
ing about the exchange power of ice pitchers and 
gold-headed canes in general. 
251 



MINOR OPPRESSIONS 

The golden rule is a false guide in giving. 
Observe the motto about putting yourself in 
his place, but in applying this don't project all 
your peculiar whims into people whom they can- 
not fit. Here is a man with a penchant for taxi- 
dermy, and his way of doing as he would be done 
by is to give the stuffed carcass of a great golden 
eagle with wings outspread to a young couple 
living in a small way in an uptown flat. Out of 
regard for this cheerful giver it hangs over the 
centre table, drawing bugs and scaring strangers 
till gratitude relaxes its grip on the conscience. 
Then it goes into the junk room. Givers have 
things too much their own way and receive too 
delicate consideration. They are bolstered up 
by partisan proverbs in a belief that they have 
no responsibilities and can do no wrong. The 
harm they often work is none the less for the 
polite concealment of the victims. They can fill 
a man's house with abominations and secret 
misery. There are ironies of benevolence beyond 
all dictates of courtesy or sentiment. Sentiment 
must not be allowed to wreck the home life. A 
252 



MINOR OPPRESSIONS 

man is not to be blamed for not wishing to live 
amid burlesque surroundings, and that is what 
it would amount to if givers persist in treating 
him as if he were the curator of a museum or 
lived in the rotunda of a national capitol. In 
time there may be text books on the art of giving, 
but in the meanwhile observe the following prov- 
erbs as amended: 

( 1 ) The Lord loveth a cheerful and intelligent 
giver. 

(2) A gift horse may not be looked in the 
mouth, but don't lose your temper if he is stabled 
in the attic. 



253 



MINOR OPPRESSIONS 

IV 

THE SERIOUS WOMAN 

If women are really anxious for equal oppor- 
tunities with men they should not make such 
terrifying threats as to what they will do when 
they get them. At an important meeting of the 
Woman's Society for the Promotion of Politi- 
cal Conversation, not long ago, one of 
the arguments for coeducation was that 
under present conditions the average girl is 
apt to see a halo around the head of a young 
man with a blond moustache, and that if 
she were associated with him in classroom work 
the halo would not be there. This is bad 
strategy, and yet women are always practising 
it, whether their aim is coeducation or the right 
to vote or equality of opportunity in the profes- 
sions. They always talk as if, when they had 
gained these things, there was going to be a 
general searching into man, to detect the creature 
as he really is and then expose him. 

Is this politic ? Is a man likely to stir himself 
254i 



MINOR OPPRESSIONS 

in their behalf if by so doing he stands to lose 
all the safeguards of his self-complacency ? This 
practice of referring to the emancipation time as 
a sort of judgment day for the other sex is no 
way to help it on even in half -won fields like co- 
education. The blond man's halo is no great 
matter, of course, because blond men are com- 
paratively rare, but it is typical of all sorts of 
little halos that it would be pleasant to keep. It 
is not easy to keep them, as things are, and when 
women begin to look at them in that steely way 
they will be as rare as the tall white hat. 

Cold-blooded remarks like this do more to keep 
history from opening its woman's page than is 
commonly supposed. It is a cry of no quarter 
to a struggling self-esteem, and makes it des- 
perate. It hurst awfully to lose a halo, and if 
women mean to abolish them they had better say 
nothing about it. 

Then there is the woman's club movement. If 

there is any man left who is disposed to take a 

light view of it he should be made to read, as I 

have done, the official organ of the Cause. It will 

255 



MINOR OPPRESSIONS 

prove to him at once that this movement is the 
most serious thing on earth. The most striking 
feature of it is the immense amount of purpose 
that a woman must have about her when she joins 
a club. "What is your aim to be in club life 
this winter?" asks the editor of the official organ. 
And here are a few of the questions that each 
member is supposed to ask herself : "What is the 
club going to be to me this winter?" "Shall we 
enter the club to seek and perhaps find an 
office? To dawdle the time away? To work 
ourselves to death ?" "Or shall we enter our club 
life once more with the determination to take 
things calmly and not overwork or overworry in 
the matter?" It is almost sacramental. Along 
with intense exaltation of spirit must go perfect 
self-control. Cool, steady hands are what they 
need for this grim business — none of your alarm- 
clock women that buzz for a little and then run 
down. No man's club ever saw the like of it. 
Cromwell's Ironsides are the nearest thing to it in 
history. It is a gigantic but not necessarily a 
hostile force. "And then let us try to make the 
^56 



MINOR OPPRESSIONS 

average man see the value of the club movement. 
He will if he does not have to eat too many cheer- 
less dinners and spend too many lonely evenings 
in consequence of it." Toss a word to the lonely, 
red-eyed husband now and then. 

Finally there is that insistent question, What 
shall we do about woman? Some of us shirk it 
from sloth, and others dodge it from cowardice, 
but there is a grim little band of women that 
neither flag nor flinch. And there is no end to 
the number of the problems or their complexity. 
"There is not space," said one of them, "in the 
course of this present article to make out a com- 
plete list of the problems which woman will help 
to solve," but she had such a list in mind, and 
knew that if she once could publish it, it would 
greatly enhance the value of this already service- 
able sex. "Marriage," she said, "is a problem in 
the solution of which woman must assist," and 
this was only one among many. "The relatively 
minor but still most important problems of 
motherhood are so interwoven with those of 
fatherhood," she went on, "that the former can- 
257 



MINOR OPPRESSIONS 

not be solved without a parallel solution of the 
latter." Up, nevertheless, and at them, as they 
come out in the magazines. But for us the prob- 
lem of problems, the question that bums and 
baffles, the damnably difficult rebus, the great 
corrosive conundrum is, Why do they talk like 
this.? 

What shall we do about woman? Need we do 
anything just now.? The hardest thing about 
the woman problem is to realize that it exists. 
Is there any serious danger that she will not suc- 
ceed as a sex.? Apart from this slight risk it 
would seem in most cases to be a mere human- 
being problem after all. People are so used to 
this large, loose language that nothing seems to 
amaze them, and when a woman exclaims, "Come 
let us solve motherhood and then expose father- 
hood, clearing up the marriage question en 
passant, ^^ it is taken as a matter of course. I 
hold that intrinsically it is supremely queer, and 
that age cannot wither or custom stale its infinite 
absurdity. And may the time never come when 
there will not be a plenty to answer these ques- 
258 



MINOR OPPRESSIONS 

tions ofFhand, with the stars all winking above 
them, and the horizon grinning around them, 
and underfoot that ancient, ironical planet which 
loves each new snapshot at its mystery as the 
best of its little old jokes. 



259 



MINOR OPPRESSIONS 



MUSIC AT MEALS 

There seems to be an increase in the number of 
our hotels and restaurants that provide music at 
meals. Bands are playing where they never 
played before, and the new places are pretty sure 
to open with an orchestra. During the past ten 
years the city's restaurants have prospered ex- 
ceedingly, but no more than they ought. What- 
ever may be said of public morals, cooking has 
certainly advanced, and it has been the ideal form 
of progress, affecting all ranks ; for not only 
have the best improved, but, what is more im- 
portant, hundreds once sunk in savagery now 
show rudiments of art. Hence it happens that 
the pilgrim may stop by the wayside at unwonted 
places at far less risk. The zone of edible steaks 
has widened with the progress of the suns. But 
the music — ^that is a more doubtful matter. No 
one ought to dogmatize about it, but whether 
the spread of it is for good or evil is a question 
to be calmly reasoned out. 
^60 



MINOR OPPRESSIONS 

To judge from appearances, the majority of 
those who eat to music are in no wise embarrassed 
by this combination of their joys. Soups and 
sonatas, mutton and nocturnes strike them less 
as rival candidates for notice than as fellow min- 
ist rants to wants. And there is warrant for it 
among the most musical people in the world, 
many of whom will absorb the most spiritual 
music and the largest sausage at the same mo- 
ment and with perfect ease. But the Germans 
have nothing to teach us in the art of dining, 
and it is that, not music, that is in question. For 
men fall obviously into the two groups of 
the eaters and the diners. The eater can 
divide his attention with almost anything 
at dinner. He can read, write, watch a dog- 
fight through the window, or foot up his ex- 
pense account for the week. If he had a nose- 
bag, like a truckman's horses, he would not at 
meal time lay down his golf clubs or his pen. It 
is a mere mechanical process like whittHng or 
folding an umbrella. On the other hand the far 
smaller class of diners have learned by experience 
261 



MINOR OPPRESSIONS 

or tradition that it is an independent art, and 
though they may not practise it proficiently they 
recognize its existence and respect its rules. The 
least epicurean among them is hurt by certain in- 
congruities. He does not want his favorite poem 
with his roast. It is no time for a high spiritual 
appeal. Charles Lamb went so far as to object 
even to saying grace at a good dinner, holding 
that it suited only a meagre or precarious meal. 
If not a poem, why a musical composition.? 
The more distractingly beautiful it is, the worse 
it is for the business in hand. It is a ridiculous 
sort of person that wants much sentiment at 
meals. Joseph Sedley is the type. All this is 
on the assumption that the music and the cookery 
are both good. The man who would serve both 
masters either closes his ears and eats merely or 
spills things and half chews, to say nothing of 
the various accessories of dining which are neg- 
lected or botched. 

But if the music is bad, which at present is 

generally the case, then there is no defence save 

that old one of giving the public what it wants, 

262 



MINOR OPPRESSIONS 

and this has nothing to do either with morals or 
with the principles of art. Things have come 
to a pretty pass if there is to be no more talking 
at meals. People do it better then than at any 
other time, and even if they do not do it well 
you can stand more from them. It could be ar- 
ranged easily enough, if the restaurants pro- 
vided one or two muffled or sound-proof rooms. 
At present the blasts of the band not only domi- 
nate every nook and corner, but they have a 
devilish way of concealing the thing so that you 
are as likely as not to sit down in its very jaws. 
Henceforth the intimacies of private conversation 
must compete with merciless things in rag-time 
accentuated by a horn, for some restaurants have 
introduced wind instruments, though as yet there 
are no drums. These may come in time, along 
with cornet, flute, harp, sackbut, psaltery and 
dulcimer, if nothing is done. 

Not to imply that the combination of music 
with dining is theoretically impossible, but com- 
posers have not had that in view. They 
have applied their genius to love, war, re- 
263 



MINOR OPPRESSIONS 

ligion, seafaring and the dance, but as yet 
there is nothing that can be called distinctively 
meal music. It comes to us, therefore, re- 
plete with other associations which are necessa- 
rily out of place. It is as absurd to eat to a war 
song as to dance to a requiem mass. Simple, un- 
obtrusive meal songs are what we need, a little 
potato cantata, say, or a fugue that will go with 
the beans. 



264 



PART VIII 

THE BUSINESS OF WRIT- 
ING, AND ITS GLORY 



LITERARY REPUTATIONS 

I ONCE read an article on "Disappearing Au- 
thors" chiefly because the title caught me, but to 
my disappointment I found that the writer had 
nothing to say beyond a mere expression of won- 
der at the disappearance of certain authors 
from the popular view. A genuine attempt to 
find out why certain once popular authors have 
disappeared would be most interesting, but there 
is a line of inquiry which is still better worth 
while. 

Suppose a man of rich literary experience 
would frankly tell what he knows about the non- 
^65 



THE BUSINESS OF WRITING 

disappearance of certain authors who really 
ought to disappear. How do they keep from 
disappearing? There's a thing worth knowing. 
How to make a reputation work for you and 
pay your coal bills and seat you high in pleasant 
places where you don't belong ; how to create the 
illusion of importance and keep it up at the least 
cost — that is a royal art whose secrets are worth 
digging for. For some reason we moralize about 
such cases, and, having caught an author at the 
trick, we feel it our duty to be indignant or at 
least contemptuous. We take this duty too se- 
riously. 

We sneer at a certain type of author because 
he keeps himself before the public as if he were 
a soap. But why in the world should he not.f* 
Why is it so much worse to work directly on a 
reputation than to work indirectly for it? We 
have no right to blame people just because they 
have not an ascetic ideal and are not bound up in 
their art, with no grosser earthly wish than a 
faint hope of some day having a handsome tomb. 
To take a spindling reputation, and by watering 
266 



THE BUSINESS OF WRITING 

it and spading the roots and killing the bugs on 
the vines, turn it into a fat garden esculent for 
the nourishment of yourself and family, is some- 
thing of a feat. There is no use in affecting to 
despise it. The man who can do it has a rare 
skill and a certain hardiness of character that 
appeal to one's respect. They are not literary 
qualities, but they are mighty in their way, and 
the rewards are fairly won. To coddle a young 
reputation is one of the most tiresome and ex- 
acting jobs in the whole world. A man with a 
real fondness for his work will not bother with it. 
Any one who does bother with it surely earns his 
pay. Think what it means. 

A literary reputation without much to go 
upon — and that is the kind I have in mind — is 
the most rickety, balky, ill-balanced thing im- 
aginable. It needs incessant care to keep it from 
running down or falling over or having holes 
punched in it by the critics. A man must live 
with every sense on the stretch for opportunities 
to advance it. No means are too humble or labo- 
rious or remote. Do you suppose it is pleasant 
267 



THE BUSINESS OF WRITING 

always to be delivering addresses on birds before 
distant kindergartners' meetings or travelling 
through the middle west of a hot June in order 
to figure on commencement platforms and ad- 
dress graduating classes on the superiority of 
high ideals over low ideals? That is a part of 
the work. So is the reading from your own books 
and the being interviewed about the influences 
that made you the man you are, and the com- 
mittee work, and the secretaryships, and the long 
talk at the ladies' afternoon club, and the insti- 
gation of the paragraph, and the praise of 
kindly reviewers, and the heading ofl^ of critics, 
and the writing of timely letters to the press, 
and the admiring of other people's books so that 
they will admire yours. A man does not do all 
this for the fun of the thing or for the mere 
gratification of conceit. It is business — a grim, 
inexorable business — and precisely the kind that 
is most irksome to the man of literary tastes. 
The artist in publicity has no easy time. 

Why, then, begrudge him what he earns .f* 
There is nothing more unreasonable than the tone 
268 



THE BUSINESS OF WRITING 

of bitterness with which men with some real gift 
for their calling refer to the successful persons 
of this class. As well grow angry at the success 
of a green grocer. Yet from Virgil to Pope, and 
from Pope to Byron, there is an unbroken chain 
of sarcasms about these exasperatingly indus- 
trious people who have earned good wages and 
filled unmarked graves. And nowadays it is the 
commonest thing in the world to hear people say 
with an aggrieved air, "Look at So-and-so. 
There is absolutely nothing in him. Yet 
see how he keeps himself before the public, and 
see how he gets on." As if the fact that there 
isn't anything in him didn't make it all the more 
wonderful and interesting that he should get on. 
The acrimonious comments upon the methods of 
Miss Marie Corelli and Mr. Hall Caine and who- 
ever may be their analogues for the moment over 
here are absurdly out of place. People like that 
are not toiling for literary ends, and they do not 
have the pleasure of their craft. To them the 
dull grind of literary work is never alleviated by 
the consciousness that the work is good. As a 



THE BUSINESS OF WRITING 

compensation they should be allowed to possess 
in peace the objects that they seek by such as- 
siduous and irksome methods. The man who likes 
to write has no quarrel with them. On the other 
hand, the curious art that these people have mas- 
tered is worthy of his dispassionate study. 



270 



THE BUSINESS OF WRITING 

II 

THE PRAISE OF MINOR AUTHORS 

The queerest kind of writing we have nowadays 
is that of the men who burst out every httle while 
and say sweet things about every living Amer- 
ican writer they can think of. I have read an 
account in a magazine of an imaginary journey 
from Indiana to the gulf, in which the writer 
pays a compliment to every local colorist on 
either side of the railway. "I kiss my hand to 
the whole genial and lovable lot," he says, as he 
takes leave of some district where the tracks of 
minor writers are particularly fresh and thick. 
And here is J. L. Jones's land, and there shines 
R. B. Smithson's country, and yonder loom the 
mountains sacred to J. Cox, Jr., and this valley 
is where W. T. Smiles "blows his flute-tunes." 
Beyond the sky-line is the home of a magazine, 
while far to the southward the young author of 
certain wondrous stories "lives quietly unspoilt 
by sudden and well-deserved fortune." And 
"dear Uncle Remus" peeps at him from Atlanta, 
271 



THE BUSINESS OF WRITING 

and S. M. Pike warbles at him from Tuskaloosa, 
and here is a nest of "low-country geniuses," and 
there is where he met a "charming poet" years 
ago, then "a bright-eyed boy full of dreams and 
rhymes." This sort of thing happens, as I said 
before, every little while. No matter how minute 
the bard or how imponderable the novelist, his 
greatness is found out. 

Some say it is a kind of bribery, a lie for a 
lie and a gush for a gush. This theory, like that 
of most motive-diggers, goes too deep. It is 
oftener a mere outburst of miscellaneous affec- 
tion, the writer actually having a heart in which 
everybody is made welcome like the lobby of an 
American hotel. And the chances are that he 
would tell you that he is encouraging literature, 
as if literary appreciation consisted in swallow- 
ing everything whole. Of course there is noth- 
ing bad about it, but the American reader is apt 
to feel as he does when he sees Frenchmen kiss 
each other. And it is not good for any class of 
men to have too much of it, even when they like 
it, least of all writers, who become idiotic under 



THE BUSINESS OF WRITING 

flattery sooner than any other set of people in 
the world. Probably they do not care so much 
about it as is generally supposed, for one does 
not value even a dog if he wags his tail for every- 
body, and it is the same way with a critic. But 
it is not a safe practice in the present state of the 
arts. We see the effects of it in the number of 
American writers who reach a certain level of 
attainment and then stop. Why should they go 
on when there are hundreds telling them that they 
have reached the top ? Should not a writer take 
it easy when he is already "superb" ? There is a 
long stretch in a writer's career where the mo- 
mentum of his past successes will carry him 
along. His muse is coasting, as you might say. 
That is the time when the critic should do any- 
thing to wake him up — throw stones at him and 
make him pedal. It looks unfeeling, but it is 
really for his good. There are so many ways of 
capitalizing a reputation that the temptation to 
knock off work is almost irresistible. When a 
man reaches the point at which he can live hand- 
somely by reading from his poems or signing 



THE BUSINESS OF WRITING 

advertisements for soap, gentle treatment will not 
suffice. The old-fashioned rawhide of Macaulay 
or Jeffreys may be the only thing that can save 
him from himself. Mistaken softness, like that 
of the writer quoted, is bad for us and for them. 
Sixty-five living American novelists all destined 
for posterity, said a critic not long ago; hardly 
a state in the Union without a superb poet, said 
another; every corner of the country provided 
with a gifted local colorist, said a third. And 
each was a respectable, middle-aged person with 
private preference in the matter of friends, wives, 
tobacco and a host of other things. It is a 
strange habit of mind. 

There must be a point beyond which the praise 
of an author cannot go without making him 
doubt the truth of it or the worth of it. In 
defiance of many great authorities on human 
nature I hold that most men do discern a divid- 
ing line between appreciation and gush and feel 
vaguely uncomfortable when that line is passed. 
The limit may be indefinitely remote, but there 
is a limit. Present literary usage ignores it alto- 
274 



THE BUSINESS OF WRITING 

gether. It is in thorough accord with this usage 
that a hterary journal will say of a new book 
that even before opening the covers you may be 
sure one of the wonders of the world awaits you. 
"Here will be no blurred or slighted words. . . . 
Here will be the finest and best of which the au- 
thor is capable. Nature herself will be here. 
Here will be supreme artistry of style, little 
miracles of observation," and so forth. You may 
parallel it in almost any column of literary com- 
ment. It is the way the literary people lay it 
on nowadays when they like a man. They some- 
times do it just because they like his publishers. 
In this instance the subject happens to be a 
writer who deserves well of us, but that only 
makes the matter worse. The intelligence that 
fits him for the work he does must sharpen his 
disgust at this absurd overrating of it. It is no 
compliment to an author to throw away all stand- 
ards and abrogate all common sense in talking of 
him, and whatever we may think of literary van- 
ity the most self-esteemed of writers does make 
distinctions as to the source of praise. He values 
275 



THE BUSINESS OF WRITING 

most the kind that is accompanied by some evi- 
dence of a sound mind. 

It is probable that sense persists in an author 
longer than it is supposed to be. I do not share 
in that low view of authors which is so prevalent 
in the literary periodicals. It is seldom that an 
author shows his claws and spits when you stroke 
him, but it does not follow that he is totally in- 
different to the personality of the stroker or to 
the kind of stroking. That is where he differs 
from other kinds of pets. A cat would as lief 
be fondled by an idiot boy if he were good to it. 
An author would not. This may sound elemen- 
tary, but it is a fact that is utterly unknown to 
hundreds of contributors to current literary com- 
ment. We sometimes hear the matter discussed 
from the point of view of the reader who may be 
disappointed or misled, and may complain that 
criticism has fallen on evil days. But no one 
opposes it for the author's sake. He is supposed 
to be pleased by it. He is a man and a brother, 
and we have no right to assume that he is not 
above it. When we write of him as if he were a 
276 



THE BUSINESS OF WRITING 

new make of motor car and we owned stock in the 
company, it does not always make him happy. 

If possible one should rid himself of that 
cynical view of human nature as always and 
everywhere at the mercy of the flatterer, however 
unskilful he may be. Tell any plain friend of 
yours that his beauty makes you glad and he 
will lose patience with you. Compliment any 
cross-eyed girl on her lovely orbs and she will 
fly out at you. To a certain extent this rule ap- 
plies to authors, though the limits are more elas- 
tic and it is rare that they openly revolt. Here 
and there an honest author is made to feel very 
sheepish by those gorgeous offerings of praise. 
"Supreme artistry of style," "miracles of obser- 
vation," "rapture," and "pure dehght" must give 
modest merit something of a turn. What is left 
over for the out-and-out divinities? One should 
keep a few hosannas for the next world. Au- 
thors are not all Bunthornes, and they have some 
sense of relative values. They know the differ- 
ence between the critic with a standard of his 
own and the reviewer whose sole outfit is a vocabu- 
S77 



THE BUSINESS OF WRITING 

lary like a billboard. They know it, and many 
of them suffer under certain kinds of eulogy. 
But the pity of it is that they suffer in silence. 
They reply to their critics often enough, but to 
the men who praise them foohshly they say 
never a word. If they would burst out on some 
rapturous appreciator once in a while and shake 
him in the full public gaze, it would be a good 
thing all around. It would help to remove some 
misconceptions. 



278 



THE BUSINESS OF WRITING 

III 

THE PHRASEMAKER 

An admirer of M. Emile Faguet quotes a string 
of his phrases to illustrate his epigrammatic 
style. Some of them are worth repeating as 
types of what are sometimes considered spark- 
ling or incisive sayings. Of Gautier, M. Faguet 
says, "He sets out from nowhere and just there 
he arrives ;" of Voltaire, "The prince of wits be- 
came the god of imbeciles ;" of Balzac, "He has 
no wit at all." It is especially hard to see why 
the last one should have been picked out, but it 
appears to be highly prized by connoisseurs, 
and, for that matter, none of them will seem won- 
derful to the ordinary mind. There is a queer 
standard for quotable sayings just now among 
critics, and the simplest sort of statement may 
turn out to be an epigram. France has always 
been apt to sacrifice too much to her guilty love 
of phrases, but of late these phrases seem to have 
deteriorated like her alcoholic drinks. A couple 
of phrases still intoxicate a Frenchman, as 
279 



THE BUSINESS OF WRITING 

Chateaubriand complained in his day, but he is 
content with a cheaper brand. And ever since 
a knot of English playwrights and authors be- 
gan some years ago to imitate this trick of 
Frenchmen at their worst, the phrasemaker has 
done considerable damage over here. Many 
honest reviewers have been set gaping by simple 
little verbal shifts that should be as easy to learn 
as punctuation. Any writer who turns out a fair 
number of brief cynical sentences, chiefly about 
love and marriage, is sure to be pointed out as 
the possessor of a brilliant style. 

Why is it that the phrasemaker so often miser- 
ably fails of eff'ect? He is an industrious per- 
son, and industry ought to tell here as well as 
anywhere else. You cannot explain exactly that 
impression of artificiality, but it is as unmis- 
takable as blondined hair. For one thing, the 
phrasemaker betrays an undue consciousness of 
words, which is quite as fatal as an undue con- 
sciousness of clothes. When a well-known writer, 
lecturing on the stage, said that the modern play 
was a compound of "devil, drivel and snivel," 
^80 



THE BUSINESS OF WRITING 

everybody knew that he worked like a Trojan 
for that phrase and valued it very highly, and 
hoped it would be noticed and perhaps envied a 
little by other phrasemakers who had not said it. 
For any one who has seen much of phrasemakers 
knows how they smack their lips over their own 
good things and how a shade of regret passes 
over their faces before they give the successful 
rival his deserved applause. One knows, too, that 
those airy little cynicisms that are tossed off on 
the spur of the moment have been hammered out 
most painfully long before. 

But the labor spent on them is not the main 
thing. It is the fact that something about them 
lets you know the labor has been spent. You can 
not cherish any illusion of spontaneity. Yet that 
is just what one wants to do with a work of art. 
It may be that a man of real gifts as a writer 
will toil four days and a night for a fit word ; but 
that does not mean a fit word for his audience, 
but only for his own idea. This process the 
phrasemaker exactly inverts. He does not care 
a rap for the thought or the fact or the real look 
281 



THE BUSINESS OF WRITING 

of the thing he is trying to describe. He will 
sacrifice any part of it to a phrase that sounds 
well. So every sentence is a sort of compromise, 
and never really means all it seems to. He is con- 
stantly changing his mental route in order to 
take in catchy phrases. Then the best half of 
his mind is always on the public, wondering if 
this or that thing will not strike them as being 
pretty good. Worse than that, he stores up in 
his head a lot of little antithetical jingles or in- 
verted truisms, thinking he will some time use 
them as impromptus, and he does use them, too, 
the cold-blooded old humbug. 

It is the most insidious vice of the literary 
temperament, and critics generally do not suffi- 
ciently warn people of the danger. Mr. How- 
ells makes one of his heroes jot down his happy 
phrases in a note book in the hope that they will 
figure in some future work of his as literary 
gems. Mr. Barrie makes one of his characters 
do the same. Neither of these people ended 
badly, as they ought to have if the writers had 
been conscientious. They were represented as 



THE BUSINESS OF WRITING 

merely taking a legitimate step in their literary 
career, and they were fairly successful. It was a 
bad moral. Outside books they would have be- 
come phrasemakers and would have attained no 
higher place than that which Oliver Wendell 
Holmes sank to a few times in an otherwise blame- 
less life. What a difference between the phrase- 
maker and the man whose thought insists on the 
words and gets them and who has no clot of ink 
on his brain. 



THE BUSINESS OF WRITING 

IV 

THE PURSUIT OF HUMOR 

While we Americans can never have too much 
humor, we can hear too much about it. I once 
followed a long controversy on the subject in the 
newspapers, especially on the question whether 
women ever possess this quality in their own 
right. It was a very solemn affair and a little 
tedious. Running through it all was an under- 
current of irritability, for these people would 
insist on citing cases in point, and just as soon 
as any one is rash enough to illustrate what he 
means by humor all hope of a peaceful discus- 
sion is gone. It is a rule alike for man and au- 
thor never to illustrate in this matter. Disap- 
pointment is sure to follow, and sometimes hate. 
Even George Meredith becomes an object of 
scorn when he gives us samples of Diana's jokes. 
A definite promise of humor is always irredeem- 
able. Then there was an extreme jealousy among 
the disputants lest any one should seem to be 
claiming more than his share. First one would 
284 



THE BUSINESS OF WRITING 

come out with a scientific definition of it and a 
general air of mastership. Then another would 
show him up as an impostor, and in so doing try 
and give the impression that he had a rather neat 
turn for it himself. Like all discussions of hu- 
mor, it was strenuous and was accompanied by 
the sound of heavy blows. 

Now it is the commonest thing in the world to 
hear people call the absence of a sense of humor 
the one fatal defect. No matter how owlish a 
man is, he will tell you that. It is a miserable 
falsehood, and it does incalculable harm. A life 
without humor is like a life without legs. You 
are haunted by a sense of incompleteness, and 
you cannot go where your friends go. You are 
also somewhat of a burden. But the only really 
fatal thing is the shamming of humor when you 
have it not. We have praised it so much that 
we have started an insincere cult, and there are 
many who think they must glorify it when they 
hate it from the bottom of their hearts. False 
humor-worship is the deadliest of social sins, and 
one of the commonest. People without a grain 
^85 



THE BUSINESS OF WRITING 

of humor in their composition will eulogize it by 
the hour. Men will confess to treason, murder, 
arson, false teeth or a wig. How many of them 
will own up to a lack of humor.? The courage 
that could draw this confession from a man would 
atone for everything. No good can come from 
the mad attempts to define humor, but there 
might be some advantage in determining how 
people should behave toward it. The first law is 
that humor is never overtaken when chased, or 
propitiated when praised. It is the one valuable 
thing which it is worth no man's while to work 
for. If this could only be learned, one of the 
gloomiest and most nefarious of industries would 
be banished from the world. 

So, whether it is a man or a woman, or a 
weekly paper or a department of a magazine, the 
best advice in case of a deliberate attempt in this 
field is to give it up altogether. No one with any 
tenderness of heart wants to be the witness of that 
awful struggle. When the laborers in this vine- 
yard take pains they always give them. That 
is the unhappy result of these discussions and of 
286 



THE BUSINESS OF WRITING 

our indiscriminate praise. Heavy-footed per- 
sons start off in pursuit and the underbrush of 
light literature is always crashing with the noise 
of their unwieldy bodies. What is gained by 
these periodical battues? No one ever bags any- 
thing, and the frightened little animal is more 
seldom seen than ever. People should be more 
cautious in what they say about humor. If there 
were less said about it there might be more of 
the thing itself, for the anxious seeker ransacks 
these discussions for guiding principles and 
starts grimly off on the trail. He becomes a 
quasi-humorist with a system. Is there any- 
thing worse? In spite of the service which real 
humor renders, one may honestly doubt whether 
it offsets the injuries committed in its name. 
There are people whom nature meant to be 
solemn from their cradle to their grave. They 
are under bonds to remain so. In so far as they 
are true to themselves they are safe company for 
any one; but outside their proper field they are 
terrible. Solemnity is relatively a blessing, and 
the man who was born with it should never be 
S87 



THE BUSINESS OF WRITING 

encouraged to wrench himself away. A solemn 
mind out of joint — that is what happens when 
the humorous ambition o'erleaps itself. It is the 
commonest of accidents in this hunting field. 

And another rule worth observing is that 
humor never works well when harnessed to a 
grudge. A writer tried to put it to this use only 
the other day. His resolute attempt to make fun 
of his political enemies took the form of mention- 
ing them one by one and remarking in each case 
that they were "positively funny." People often 
refer to others as "positively funny" when what 
they really want to do is to garrote them ; as if a 
thing conceived in darkness and shapen in malig- 
nity became humor by the invocation of the name. 
This is worse than the ordinary style of pursuit. 
It is the press-gang method. 



288 



THE BUSINESS OF WRITING 

V 

THE TEMPTATION OF AUTHORS 

The devil does not have to take the author to 
any mountain top in order to tempt him. It is 
much simpler. He merely sends around a smooth 
agent with orders to make a contract with that 
author on any terms — on no account to come 
away without the promise of an article or a book. 
We seldom hear what really goes on at these in- 
terviews, but their general results appear plainly 
enough from the publishers' lists and the files of 
the magazines. It does not seem as if the success- 
ful American author could refuse many jobs. 
The bulk of what he writes and the nature of the 
topics he writes on indicate that by the proper 
means he can be urged to a pretty smart pace in 
the matter of turning out copy. The beginner 
always dreams of the blessed day when the pub- 
lisher will have to seek him, not he the publishers, 
and he usually pictures himself as repelling 
many of them with some sternness, for of what 
use is success if it does not enable you to choose 
^89 



THE BUSINESS OF WRITING 

your own time and your own subjects and break 
away from the odious bondage to the pot-boiler? 
Obscure merit glows all over at this view of him- 
self repulsing great crowds of publishers and 
editors with a few trenchant words about his ar- 
tistic integrity. The chances are he has quite 
a collection of polite sarcasms stored up 
against that day — things which would look 
rather well in print in case the newspapers 
should report them, as they undoubtedly 
would, in spite of his reticence about the 
affair. 

But the temptation is too subtle and too many 
good men have succumbed to it to warrant this 
high confidence. The constant draining of our 
well-known authors is one of the saddest things 
in current literature. Apparently there is no 
age and no degree of success that is safe from it. 
You might think that toward the close of a long 
and honorable literary career a man would feel 
entitled to the luxury of writing only when and 
what he pleased. Yet no sooner does he reach 
that point than he pours out a perfect flood of 
290 



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articles and interviews on subjects that it must 
bore him to death to think of. You find him dis- 
coursing in any kind of newspaper or magazine 
about things that no unfettered human mind 
would linger on for five minutes. The success- 
ful author is like the department store. There 
is no corner of periodical literature where you do 
not see his delivery wagon, and there is no end 
to the variety of goods delivered. Sin, free sil- 
ver, mother's love and the books that helped him, 
success, football and the fear of death — any- 
thing under the sun seems successively to at- 
tract that serviceable mind. That he really 
would write on those things if left to himself few 
are so cynical as to believe. Good authors are 
not by nature rapid-firing. If they become so, 
you may be sure somebody has been tampering 
with them. An author is like a clock. Let an 
editor fool with him and set him to striking all 
the hours at once and he is out of order forever 
afterward. 

An enterprising editor once took it into his 
head that the public would be much interested in 
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reading the answers of a number of persons, each 
eminent in his line, to the question, What do you 
fear most? So he arranged a "symposium" of 
milHonaires, dancers, actresses, railway mag- 
nates, politicians, authors and other worthies, 
each of whom contributed an essay or an inter- 
view on this subject. Thus the eager public had 
a chance to compare the fears of the successful 
politician with the fears of the man who had 
made his fortune in steel. The author who took 
part in this brilliant affair — and he was one of 
the best we have — supplied an essay to the ef- 
fect that young people feared death more than 
old people, and that old people feared the loss 
of money more than young people, and that fear 
was an attitude of mind that tended to produce 
cowardice. What did it mean.^^ Merely that 
something had to be written. No mind, how- 
ever strong it may have been at the start, can 
hold out when it is treated like that. A man's 
whole soul is in danger of being waterlogged 
when he dilutes his thoughts to that ex- 
tent. 

293 



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The danger in spreading one's self thin is that 
the time surely comes when it is done uncon- 
sciously. A man thinks it is his thought that is 
flowing on like that when it is only his ink. 
There are few people to warn him because there 
are few that know the diff*erence. People gen- 
erally do not realize that authors are deliquescent 
and should be kept in a dry place. Then the 
temptation to the author assumes such virtuous 
form. There is thrift, for instance. It is a vir- 
tue which we humble folk may safely strive for. 
But thrift ruins more authors than all the vices 
put together. As a man he may have as hand- 
some a set of private morals as you ever saw, 
and yet as an author be going to the dogs at 
lightning speed. Journeywork does the thing 
oftener than either opium or absinthe. Can the 
"muse" fill orders every day? If it does, how 
does it differ from that despised thing, jour- 
nalism.? That the majority of writers should 
do this sort of thing implies no waste at all. If 
they waited all their lives probably nothing bet- 
ter would occur to them. But that the mind of 
293 



THE BUSINESS OF WRITING 

an estimable author should be for rent for every 
purpose is a wicked and incongruous thing. It 
is like the chartering of a United States battle- 
ship for every clam bake. 



294. 



THE BUSINESS OF WRITING 

VI 

THE JOURNALIST AND HIS BETTERS 

How FOND people are of trying to define the 
boundary between journalism and literature. 
There is never a time when some writer is not 
pegging away at it. Failure cannot discourage 
or reiteration stale, and we may as well expect 
to see the same thing tried in almost the same 
language every day for the rest of our lives. 
In one of the recent attempts the investigator 
decides that the difference between journalism 
and hterature is that, while journalistic work is 
done with the expectation that it will soon perish, 
literary work is done "in the high hope that it 
might be eternal." This definition has the merit 
of perfect clearness as well as ease of applica- 
tion by squarely dividing the two according to 
the self-confidence of the writer. If he is the 
kind of man who is tolerably sure that he and 
eternity were made for each other, he is a literary 
person. If he suspects that the eternal may have 
no use for him, he is a journalist. Now, there is 
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THE BUSINESS OF WRITING 

no use in a newspaper man's trying to debate this 
matter. He is bound to get the worst of it. It 
is a reckless thing to stand up against a man 
who knows he is eternal and all that. Still there 
are a good many light literary characters who 
may have some misgivings about their eternity, 
and these he dares address, though, of course, 
with deference, for he cannot conceive of any- 
thing nearer eternity in his own case than the 
intervals between stations on the elevated road. 

To these literary persons he feels drawn by the 
consciousness of a common destiny. Apart from 
the natural enthusiasm of their respective widows, 
oblivion in each case will set in about four days 
after death. There are no class distinctions in 
the land of the forgotten. As between the lum- 
ber room and the waste basket there is little 
choice. But while the doom is precisely the same 
for the majority of each profession, the news- 
paper man has this great advantage. He knows 
what this doom will be, and is ready for it, and be- 
does not waste five minutes of his life in worrying 
about it one way or the other. At least he is not 



THE BUSINESS OF WRITING 

laying up for himself a disappointed ghosthood, 
and it is pretty certain that the shades of some 
exceedingly literary persons will be terribly an- 
noyed by what is going to happen to their works 
after death. And there is another burden that 
the newspaper man is free from. He does not 
have to talk in such a very large way about his 
work as art, or to feel oppressed with that sense 
of responsibility for nature's priceless gifts. Be- 
ing without worries of this kind, he has more 
chance to meet people on equal and agreeable 
terms. That is the great thing about being un- 
literary and uneternal. You do not have any of 
those dreadfully serious duties toward yourself. 
You are not obliged to sing psalms to the holy 
things inside you or to act as if you were a special 
little ark of the covenant for something that no 
one but yourself knows the value of. That leaves 
you leisure and a light heart — a low level, but 
with its humble joys. A newspaper man does not 
envy the general run of authors. He would be 
scared to death by the consciousness of all that 
talent. Indeed, if he should ever feel inside him 
^97 



THE BUSINESS OF WRITING 

what certain literary characters sometimes call 
their "muse," he would see a doctor and take 
something for it. 

For if there is one thing in the world that 
would embarrass an honest journalist it is the 
obligation to exhibit a handsome diction with 
never a single fact or thought to hang it on — 
to keep a sort of show window of word millinery 
as a sign that first-rate literary work is done 
inside. But people who say they have the 
"muses" do not seem to mind this sort of thing 
in the least. Thought is only a clothes-line to 
them, anyhow. It is not wise for the people who 
are just across the border to sniff so at the news- 
paper man, lowly though he be. What is the 
use in their rigging things out for eternity when 
they cannot reach the middle of next week.'' 
The newspaper man cannot make his words sing, 
as Stevenson said, but at least he is spared the 
awkwardness of being the only person who 
knows that they are singing. And since words 
will not always sing, why is it not a good plan 
even in light literature to have an idea or two 
298 



THE BUSINESS OF WRITING 

to fall back upon ? And if you have not an idea, 
find a fact. Literature should not be so light that 
you do not feel it. Surely there are many au- 
thors who are merely journalists of a slower 
breed. The journalist is not as a rule sensitive, 
but he does not believe that there is an aristocracy 
of failure. What has eternity to do with the rank 
and file of either class.? 

When the two professions have so much in 
common it seems foolish to be bothering about 
boundaries. It would be better to unite against 
the common enemy of both. There is a kind of 
man who has no business in either. He is the 
man with the inveterate vice of having nothing 
to say. He is superfluous even in a Sunday issue. 
He confounds tenuity with refinement, and pub- 
lishes a volume on the strength of one etiolated 
idea. Say what you will about style, mere gram- 
mar will not make an author, even if the gram- 
mar is superb. A literary aspirant once wrote to 
a publisher that she could write well if she only 
had ideas. This idea of style is as injurious in 
what is classed as literature as in the daily papers. 



THE BUSINESS OF WRITING 

Those smoothly rounded sentences, each one the 
assassin of a thought, those pastels in prose 
which are nothing but prose, and those extremely 
emaciated essays are neither journalism nor 
literature. Dilution is the one thing that is 
fatal, whether it is "literary" or not, and a high 
hoping for the eternal only makes it worse. No 
matter where the line be drawn, it should not in- 
clude this, for things perish quicker for lack 
of substance than for lack of form. The real 
dread of the honest followers of either craft 
should be the dread of spreading themselves thin, 
and if the year's production of books could be 
piled up alongside its periodicals it would be hard 
to say which class had sinned the more. But this 
thing is certain. No member of either would be 
a whit the worse for the good qualities of the 
other. 



300 



THE BUSINESS OF WRITING 

VII 

RUNNING AN ORACLE 

One of the pleasantest lines of newspaper work 
is the composition of those editorial articles on 
foreign politics which unmask the designs of the 
great powers and explain what is known as a 
"world movement." It is work that confers dig- 
nity on the writer from the impressive nature of 
the material with which it deals. It is not scruti- 
nized as sharply as other kinds of work, because 
it takes one's breath away at the start. Very few 
people, for example, distinguished between the 
articles on the Chinese situation which the news- 
papers were obliged to publish every other day. 
They like to see such articles on an editorial page 
as a sign that the paper is keeping up with the 
times ; but so long as they all have the air of cer- 
tainty they are all equally able and authoritative. 
The man who can speak familiarly as to what the 
"Russian Colossus" is up to, and what France 
thinks about it, has everything in his own 
hands. Nobody thinks of checking him off. That 
301 



THE BUSINESS OF WRITING 

familiar tone does the business. World politics 
afford the one sinecure in the newspaper profes- 
sion. In general these articles conform to one of 
two types. There is the solemnly judicious ar- 
ticle, which, though masterly, is found, on analy- 
sis, to be somewhat non-committal. And there is 
the article of mysterious sources. 

Here is a model article of the former type 
on the future of China. "It looks very much 
indeed as if an acute crisis were impending in 
China," says the writer in the sure, firm style 
with which these experts approach their subjects. 
But the true spirit of this kind of writing ap- 
pears in the following sentence: "Anything may 
happen in China in the next six months, or noth- 
ing may happen." That shows the practiced 
hand. The soundest editorial articles on world 
politics are built on these imperishable founda- 
tions. What, then, is China's future.? That will 
depend on the issue of the next six months. If 
nothing happens, there is no reason to expect any 
very radical changes. If, on the other hand, 
things do happen, then changes of the deepest 
302 



THE BUSINESS OF WRITING 

and most far-reaching importance are almost 
certain to occur. These things being so, the 
writer says : "It may be well to look dispassion- 
ately at general conditions and at future pros- 
pects." What do we find? We notice first that 
the forces at work in China "are both internal 
and external;" there is a force that makes for 
progress and a force that does not. The rest is in 
keeping with this. The significant thing about 
it is permanence and universality. It will apply 
as well to the future of Austria-Hungary and 
the German empire when the occasion arises. The 
result of its success is the saying of obvious 
things with the air of having all the powers at 
the other end of a private wire. 

To run these oracles all any one needs is a 
war rumor and a copy of the Statesman's Year 
Book and a solemn manner. If the news is true, 
then it is indeed serious. There are some aspects 
of the situation which you cannot but view with 
grave anxiety. Will the Russian bear show his 
claws .f* "It is not generally known that" and 
"People who look beneath the surface of things 



THE BUSINESS OF WRITING 

say" are good and well-tried expressions. You 
should also own a few "undercurrents of political 
opinion." These are to be found at any time in 
a single article in a foreign review, but it is 
wiser not to quote the author, as it sounds better 
to say, "In certain quarters the view is held." 
The quickest way to get at the very core of 
world politics is through the pages of one of 
these articles. Some of the weightiest inside in- 
formation articles, whose writer you might sup- 
pose had been hiding under the table at every 
cabinet meeting in Europe, are made in this way. 
We have, of course, men who are well versed in 
these subjects, and who put their own brains into 
their work. But the point is that these qualifica- 
tions are not necesary for the running of an 
oracle on foreign politics. With the weighty 
manner one fares quite as well. The man who 
says "Anything may happen in China in the next 
six months, or nothing may happen" has as large 
an audience. He is respected and liked. It is 
a comfortable and an honorable life, and in spite 
of competition the earnings are enormous in pro- 
304 



THE BUSINESS OF WRITING 

portion to the labor involved. As a people we 
may be suspicious about some things and not bad 
hands at a bargain, but the man who runs an 
oracle is apt to find us a good thing. 



305 



THE BUSINESS OF WRITING 

VIII 

FOR WOMAN AND THE HOME 

An article published some time ago in an im- 
portant London magazine shows what a serious- 
minded British editor sometimes thinks of his 
public. The writer tells us that woman should 
be womanly, that she should be intelligent and at 
the same time kind; that, "above all, nothing 
should be done to diminish the immense fund of 
affection stored up in women's hearts." "We 
might possibly spare science and philosophy," 
says he ; "we might certainly spare many inven- 
tions, but we could not spare from the world a 
mother's love." And lest some of his readers may 
still be unconvinced, he adds that while it is bet- 
ter that woman should know "how to cook an 
appetizing dinner for the tired husband than 
how to chatter about Shelley," she ought not to 
be entirely untaught. He is radical on that 
point, arguing with much earnestness against 
leaving her in her wild native state, for she "is 
not likely to love husband, brother or child the 
306 



THE BUSINESS OF WRITING 

more because she is ignorant and helpless." But 
he advises caution in applying this principle. 
The wild woman who cooks may lose something 
in transition, just as strawberries lose flavor when 
cultivated, or gallinaceous birds when domesti- 
cated. How domesticate the partridge without 
diminishing the gamy flavor; how teach woman 
to read Shelley without loss of true womanhood? 
That is the problem. While opposed to any- 
thing like overeducation,he believes that the mind 
of woman should receive some attention for two 
reasons : First, she is a companion to man. He 
approves of this and thinks it ought to be en- 
couraged. "Let the idea of companionship be- 
tween man and woman prevail more," he says. 
Secondly, her education will be useful to the 
children. On this point, and in finally summing 
up, he says : 

"Nothing could be more delightful, more help- 
ful, both to mother and child, than a common 
interest in things of the mind. The children 
should not look on the mother as a kind of house- 
hold slave who looks after the dinner and who 
packs them off to school; nor should the mother 

307 



THE BUSINESS OF WRITING 

think of the children as so many little faces and 
hands to be washed or so many little mouths to be 
fed. . . . Indeed, we suggest that a new and 
brighter meaning might be given to home by a 
judicious education and a wise liberty to her by 
whose loving activity and goodness home is 
made." 

The article is unsigned, but it was probably 
written by a man. Most of this kind of writing 
is done by men, and there is a great deal of it. 
The significance of this particular case is that 
the thing appears in a magazine meant for full- 
grown men and women of this world, not for a 
constituency of apple-cheeked cherubs. But 
there is this much to be said for the writer: Of 
all subjects in current literature woman is the 
one that draws out the worst there is in man. An 
odd change comes over him when woman is his 
theme — a sort of sea-change, judged by the 
wateriness of the results. And does it please wo- 
man.? Does the mother heart glow at the sight 
of the strong man simpering in his beard, and is 
there no mother head to take offense at him.'^ 
Surely more things might be taken for granted 
308 



THE BUSINESS OF WRITING 

by the writer on women and the home. Let him 
try talking hke this to her face and see what hap- 
pens. That is a fair test. One thing that makes 
man write of woman as he does is the knowledge 
that she cannot get at him. Certainly you may 
read your Shelley, and even a little thinking will 
not hurt, but not too much, mind, and do not for- 
get to beam on the tired husband. Heat his slip- 
pers for him, wash the children, cook the din- 
ner ; then crouch behind the storm door to spring 
out and beam the minute you hear him scuffling 
on the door mat. Beam thoroughly, then out 
with a blast of Shelley at him. There you have 
the true woman, though educated: mother heart 
true as steel, affections sound, husband fed, chil- 
dren washed, and yet the savage bride now reads 
light literature. Thus is the sex problem solved 
and civilization may go on with perfect confi- 
dence. 

Woman is unfortunate in her advisers. What 

a time of it we should have if she deliberately set 

out to make home happy by the rules laid down 

for her. What with the routine beaming and the 

309 



THE BUSINESS OF WRITING 

scheduled companionship and the memorized 
home thoughts, where would the tired husband 
be? You would find that haggard refugee nest- 
ing in a tree-top. But there is no danger of it. 
The only serious question is that of journalistic 
standards. Why do we dedicate to woman and 
the home the most demented portions of our 
periodicals ? 

Not in a spirit of chivalry, but of common 
fairness, I hold that there is no such intellectual 
disparity between the sexes as would appear from 
these writings. The women one ordinarily meets 
are not at the level of the usual woman's page 
or of the average magazine for women. Women 
read these things, of course, but chiefly for tech- 
nical information, for suggestions as to pickles 
or finger bowls, or things to put on hats — which 
occult and complicated matters have as much 
right to a literature of their own as entomology 
— and no one can despise the intellect that follows 
them in all their abstruse windings. But what 
I have in mind are the non-technical articles in 
regard to which man and woman are on an equal 
310 



THE BUSINESS OF WRITING 

footing. Why write so very far down just be- 
cause you are writing for women? And why do 
women not resent the practice? 

Here is a typical passage from a typical lit- 
erary article in a woman's magazine. The writer 
explains for the benefit of women's clubs how 
Browning should be studied and what blessings 
result from the study. He says : "When one has 
mastered Browning's conception of the nature of 
love and of the ends of art and its spiritual sig- 
nificance, he is well on the way to the poet's view 
of life." Fancy a string of similar passages run- 
ning through three or four pages, and you have a 
fair picture of what the woman of culture is sup- 
posed to like. It is true with the truth of the first 
spelling book. It is as irreproachable as regular 
breathing. But why are women thought to need 
it? That is the baffling part of the thing. Do 
not women know that the way to study a poet is 
to read his poems thoughtfully, and are there any 
of them that need be told that art has its inner 
meaning, Hfe its deeper joys? Take this, for 
example: "Browning is primarily a poet and 
311 



THE BUSINESS OF WRITING 

should be approached as a poet." Why tell a 
woman that? Could she not guess it? Would 
she be likely to approach him as a plumber? 
And this suggests the general question that 
always troubles the male reader of these articles : 
If adult human beings who have had a fair 
chance in life still remain at the stage which this 
kind of writing implies, why bother with them at 
all? You cannot save them, certainly not by 
these means, for if they had in them a spark of 
affection for books they would rebel against this 
way of writing about books. That is the trouble 
with the woman's writer. There is nothing left 
of a good thing when he has once adapted it. 
And where is the benefit in knowing about books 
when you do not care for what is inside them? 
It is meritorious only in a librarian. It is no 
one's duty to be literary. 

It seems a waste of time to blame people for 
writing platitudes, but that is not the point. 
The platitude must always be. What I protest 
against is that it should be so unevenly distri- 
buted between the sexes by our periodicals. And 
312 



THE BUSINESS OF WRITING 

why pretend that reading this kind of an article 
does anything to the mind? As well advise peo- 
ple to sleep with a volume of poems under their 
pillow in order to wake up "cultured" in the 
morning. 

Women, of course, are themselves in part to 
blame for the woman's writer. They take him 
more seriously than men do, and when they do 
not take him seriously they are more patient with 
him than men would be. There is no doubt that 
those molluscous writers who fasten themselves to 
the reputations of dead geniuses, and say amiable 
things about books which they do not understand, 
have a disproportionately large feminine con- 
stituency. By merely praising Homer, Plato, 
Dante and Shakespeare, and by laying claim to 
certain large, vague sensations when they read 
them, it is possible to establish a literary stand- 
ing. If they follow this up with an occasional 
good word for high ideals and the ends of art 
and the true conception of life, they may attain 
quite a high place in contemporary estimation. 
The thing has been done. And though the 
313 



THE BUSINESS OF WRITING 

woman's writer may have known at the start that 
what he said did not mean anything, this self- 
knowledge does not last. In his final stage he 
believes in himself. That is the last and lowest 
point he reaches. 

After all, is he not harmless and even useful 
as an educator? There is this much harm in him : 
In so far as people read him they are kept from 
doing other things. That of itself is bad. They 
reach those absurd, straggling suburbs of litera- 
ture, and there they stop. They read articles 
about books which describe other books, and so 
cultivate a sort of third cousinship to literature. 
Then the woman's writer is an awful example of 
what literature may do to a man. If association 
with masterpieces all his days leaves him in such 
a state, it must scare people away from master- 
pieces. There are dangers involved in his exist- 
ence from whatever point you view him, though 
I admit that at first thoughts there is nothing in 
all nature that seems more innocuous than he. 



314 



THE BUSINESS OF WRITING 

IX 

ON BEHALF OF OBSCURE VERSE 

It is a tame little affair, to be sure — the average 
poem of the magazines, and when I say average 
poem, I mean almost every poem that appears 
in them, for rarely does one venture to differ 
much from every other one. But it is easy to be 
too pessimistic about them, and if anyone will 
take the trouble to run through the old files he 
will arise feeling fairly cheerful in regard to the 
minor verse of his own generation. It is better 
than it used to be because it has a larger supply 
of antecedent verse to draw upon for imitation. 
It is a fuller and more composite echo. There is 
more of it than there used to be, but there is noth- 
ing depressing in that, because it has not outrun 
the increase in population. Another consoling 
thought is that a large part of the humdrum 
verse of to-day affords more training to the 
reader's wits. As between the commonplace verse 
that is perfectly intelligible and the commonplace 
verse that is obscure, the latter has this disciplin- 
315 



THE BUSINESS OF WRITING 

ary advantage. At least you work your minii, 
and even if you find nothing, the exercise has 
done you good. The mere value of a metrical 
rebus, you will say. Well, even that is some- 
thing. 

And this leads to the point I wish to empha- 
size. So long as the kernel of magazine verse re- 
mains what it is, I would not have it easier to be 
got at. I put in a plea for the continuance of 
this obscurity, and I do so with the more haste 
and earnestness because I have lately noticed a 
tendency to complain of it. "Now what in the 
world does she mean by that?" asks a reviewer 
with bitterness as he quotes two complicated sen- 
tences without verbs addressed by a young lady 
to one of her emotions. Mercy on us! The 
meaning is just what was meant to be withheld. 
Such a question ignores the rules of the game. 
If reviewers begin to act like that, they will soon 
destroy the industry altogether. The composi- 
tion of this kind of magazine verse consists in 
this very secretiveness as to meanings. The per- 
former takes a fairly simple and fairly obvious 
316 



THE BUSINESS OF WRITING 

thought and first writes it down in direct, cold 
prose. This done, it is carefully examined to see 
how well it lends itself to verbal entanglements. 
If it seems to have possibilities in this respect, 
the work of ensnarling is begun. Words are 
wound around it phrase by phrase till just the 
faintest suggestion of the thought peeps out 
through a crack in the verbiage. Then it is the 
reader's turn to guess what is inside. If it takes 
a good deal of time and worry, so much the bet- 
ter. He feels something of a sportsman's zest. 
He is rather glad to get it, even if it does not 
amount to much. To illustrate, let us take a 
concrete case. You want to say something about 
the dread of separation — whether of the soul 
from the body or the lover from his mistress, it 
matters not what. Take just that one situation. 
You snatch at many paraphrases and discard 
them one by one for lack of subtlety. Finally, 
after mousing around among words and mutter- 
ing things like "foregleam of the ache of ab- 
sence" and "ill-seeming shade of otherwhere" 
(which you see at a glance would never do in the 
317 



THE BUSINESS OF WRITING 

world as synonyms for incipient bereavement), 
let us suppose you hit on something rather queer, 
such, for example as "the germ of alibi." It 
sounds foolish at first, but upon consideration 
may seem worth while, for it is an unusual col- 
location of words and hides the thought almost 
beyond chance of detection. Now if for every 
other simple phrase you can find so successful a 
substitute, if every turn of your thought can be 
made to twist itself into such remotely suggestive, 
such slenderly related language, you may pro- 
duce a poem in the modern magazine manner. 
But it means work. 

The "germ of alibi" may not be a very con- 
vincing illustration, though I may say in pass- 
ing that it is taken from the collected verses of 
an excellent and very, very serious writer. Still 
in a measure it represents the aspiration of maga- 
zine verse. It betokens an eagerness for enig- 
matic charm. It is an elaborate tucking away 
of the humdrum, an obscuration of the insignifi- 
cant, and that I believe is the characteristic of 
this sort of verse. And in saying so I wish to reg- 
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THE BUSINESS OF WRITING 

ister my hearty approval. Obscurity of style 
in these cases is a merciful thing. Not only that, 
but it gives a positive pleasure to two classes of 
readers. First, there are those who find excite- 
ment in the difficulties of the quest, who like to 
track the elusive thought to its lair. Secondly, 
there is the larger class that love the vague merely 
because it is vague and looks the bigger for its 
vagueness. 

Therefore I am disturbed by the brutal stand- 
and-deliver attitude of certain reviewers who are 
forever holding up poems and demanding their 
meanings. And there is a special savagery in the 
prevailing practice of reviewing six or seven little 
volumes of collected magazine poems all in a 
bunch under the title of "Some Recent Verse." 
A review like that is a potter's field of poets. 
Again and again you will find a half dozen poets 
huddled together under a collective title and dis- 
posed of all at once, as a housemaid might kill 
flies with a twisted newspaper. Obscure maga- 
zine verse is not rightly appreciated. Review- 
ers do not remark the stress and strain that go to 
319 



THE BUSINESS OF WRITING 

its production. It represents fierce and unre- 
mitting toil, and its murkiness is not accidental, 
but deliberately and painfully wrought. A 
magazine versifier of to-day would never write : 

** I saw the hole myself," he cried. 

** 'Twas four feet long and two feet Made." 

He would never exclaim: 

** Twelve, didst thou say ? Curse on those dozen 
villains." 

He would never fall with Wordsworth into 
such lines as: 

O mercy, to myself I said. 
What if Lucy should be dead ? 

He is more likely to reproduce the melody 

of Meredith's much-quoted line : 

The friable, and the grumous, dizzards both. 

And for my part I prefer the latter model, 
for at least it stirs the curiosity. 



320 



THE BUSINESS OF WRITING 



IN DARKEST JAMES 

Some time ago, when Henry James wrote an 
essay on women that brought to my cheek the hot, 
rebelhous blush, I said nothing about it, thinking 
that perhaps, after all, the man's style was his 
sufficient fig-leaf, and that few would see how 
shocking he really was. And, indeed, it had been 
a long time since the pubhc knew what Henry 
James was up to behind that verbal hedge of his, 
though half-suspecting that he meant no good, 
because a style like that seemed just the place for 
guilty secrets. But those of us who had formed 
the habit of him early could make him out even 
then, our eyes having grown so used to the deep- 
ening shadows of his later language that they 
could see in the dark, as you might say. I say this 
not to brag of it, but merely to show that there 
were people who partly understood him even in 
The Sacred Fount, and he was clearer in his es- 
says, especially in that wicked one on "George 
321 



THE BUSINESS OF WRITING 

Sand : The New Life," published in an American 
magazine. 

Here he was as bold as brass, telling women 
to go ahead and do and dare, and praising the 
fine old hearty goings-on at the court of Augus- 
tus the Strong, and showing how they could be 
brought back again if women would only try. 
His impunity was due to the sheer laziness of the 
expurgators. They would not read him, and 
they did not believe anybody else could. They 
justified themselves, perhaps, by recalling pas- 
sages like these in the Awkward Age: 

"What did this feeling wonderfully appear unless 
strangely irrelevant " 

*'But she fixed him with her weary penetration. ..." 

"He jumped up at this, as if he couldn't bear it, pre- 
senting as he walked across the room a large, foolish, 
fugitive back, on which her eyes rested as on a proof of 
her penetration " 

"My poor child, you're of a profundity " 

"He spoke almost uneasily, but she was not too much 
alarmed to continue lucid." 

"You're of a limpidity, dear man ! " 

"Don't you think that's rather a back seat for one's 
best?" 

" 'A back seat ? ' she wondered, with a purity." 

"Your aunt didn't leave me with you to teach you the 
slang of the day." 

" 'The slang?' she spotlessly speculated." 

Arguing from this that he was bent more on 



THE BUSINESS OF WRITING 

eluding pursuit than on making converts, they 
let things pass that in other writers would have 
been immediately rebuked. He had, in fact, 
written furiously against the proprieties for sev- 
eral years. "There is only one propriety," he 
said, "that the painter of life can ask of a sub- 
ject : Does it or does it not belong to life?" He 
charged our Anglo-Saxon writers with "a con- 
spiracy of silence," and taunted them with the 
fact that the women were more improper than the 
men. "Emancipations are in the air," said he, 
"but it is to women writers that we owe them." 
The men were cowards, rarely venturing a single 
coarse expression, but already in England there 
were pages upon pages of women's work so 
strong and rich and horrifying and free that a 
man could hardly read them. Halcyon days, 
they seemed to him, and woman the harbinger of 
a powerful Babylonish time when the impro- 
prieties should sing together like the morning 
stars. Not an enthusiastic person generally, he 
always warmed to this particular theme with 
generous emotion. 



THE BUSINESS OF WRITING 

His essay on George Sand discussing what he 
calls the "new life," cited the heart history of 
that author as "having given her sex for its new 
evolution and transformation the real standard 
and measure of change." It was all recorded in 
Mme. Karenine's biography, and Mme. Karenine, 
being a Russian with an "admirable Slav super- 
iority to prejudice," was able to treat the matter 
in a "large, free way." A life so amorously pro- 
fuse was sure to set an encouraging example, 
he thought. Her heart was like an hotel, occu- 
pied, he said, by "many more or less greasy 
males" in quick succession. He hoped the time 
would come when other women's hearts would be 
as miscellaneous: 

"In this direction their aim has been, as yet, 
comparatively modest and their emulation low; 
the challenge they have hitherto picked up is but 
the challenge of the average male. The approxi- 
mation of the extraordinary woman has been, 
practically, in other words, to the ordinary man. 
Madame Sand's service is that she planted the 
flag much higher; her own approximation, at 
least, was to the extraordinary. She reached 
him, she surpassed him, and she showed how, with 

324 



THE BUSINESS OF WRITING 

native, dispositions, the thing could be done. 
These new records will live as the precious text- 
book, so far as we have got, of the business." 

This was plain enough. Any other man would 
have been suppressed. In a literature so well 
policed as ours, the position of Henry James was 
anomalous. He was the only writer of the day 
whose unconventional notions did not matter. His 
dissolute and complicated Muse might say just 
what she chose. Perhaps this was because it 
would have been so difficult to expose him. 
Never did so much "vice" go with such sheltering 
vagueness. Whatever else may be said of James 
at this time, he was no tempter, and though the 
novels of this period deal only with unlawful 
passions, they make but chilly reading on the 
whole. It is a land where the vices have no bodies 
and the passions no blood, where nobody sins be- 
cause nobody has anything to sin with. Why 
should we worry when a spook goes wrong ? For 
years James did not create one shadow-casting 
character. His love affairs, illicit though they 
be, are so stripped to their motives that they seem 
325 



THE BUSINESS OF WRITING 

no more enticing than a diagram. A wraith 
proves faithless to her marriage vow, elopes with 
a bogie in a cloud of words. Six phantoms meet 
and dine, three male, three female, with two 
thoughts apiece, and, after elaborate geometry 
of the heart, adultery follows like a Q. E. D. 
Shocking it ought to be, but yet it is not. 
Ghastly, tantalising, queer, but never near 
enough human to be either good or bad. To be 
a sinner, even in the books you need some carnal 
attributes — lungs, liver, tastes, at least a pair of 
legs. Even the fiends have palpable tails ; wise 
men have so depicted them. No flesh, no frailty ; 
that may be why our sternest moralists licensed 
Henry James to write his wickedest. They saw 
that whatever the moral purport of these books, 
they might be left wide open in the nursery. 

To those who never liked him he is the same 
in these writings as in those before and since. 
They complain that even at his best he is too apt 
to think that when he has made a motive he has 
made a man. Nevertheless, though the world of 
his better novels is small, it is always credible — 



THE BUSINESS OF WRITING 

humanity run through a sieve, but still humanity. 
During this dark period his interests seemed to 
drop off one by one, leaving him shut in with his 
single theme — the rag, the bone and the hank of 
hair, the complicated amours of skeletons. They 
called it his later manner, but the truth is, it was 
a change in the man himself. He saw fewer 
things in this spacious world than he used to see, 
and the people were growing more meagre and 
queer and monotonous, and it was harder and 
harder to break away from the stump his fancy 
was tied to. 

In The Wings of the Dove there were signs 
of a partial recovery. There were people who 
saw no difference between it and The Sacred 
Fount or The Awkward Age, but they were no 
friends of his. By what vice of introspection he 
got himself lashed to that fixed idea it is impossi- 
ble to say, but it was clear that neither of those 
books was the work of a mind entirely free. In 
one aspect it was ridiculous ; but if one laughed, 
it was with compunctions, for in another aspect it 
was exceedingly painful. This only from the 
327 



THE BUSINESS OF WRITING 

point of view of his admirers. It is not forgotten 
that there is the larger class (for whom this world 
in the main was made) to whom he is merely ridic- 
ulous. They do not see why thoughts so unwill- 
ing to come out need be extracted. 

To be sure in The Wings of the Dove there is 
the same absorption in the machinery of motive 
and in mental processes the most minute. 
Through page after page he surveys a mind as a 
sick man looks at his counterpane, busy with little 
ridges and grooves and undulations. There are 
chapters like wonderful games of solitaire, 
broken by no human sound save his own chuckle 
when he takes some mysterious trick or makes a 
move that he says is "beautiful." He has a way 
of saying "There you are" that is most exasper- 
ating, for it is always at the precise moment at 
which you know you have utterly lost yourself. 
There is no doubt that James's style is often too 
puffed up with its secrets. Despite its air of im- 
mense significance, the dark, unfathomed cave of 
his ocean contain sometimes only the same sort 
of gravel you could have picked up on the shore. 
328 



THE BUSINESS OF WRITING 

I have that from deep sea thinkers who have been 
down with him. But though this unsociable way 
of writing continues through The Wings of the 
'Dove, it came nearer than any other novel that 
he had pubHshed for some years to the quality of 
his earlier work. It deals with conditions as well 
as with people. Instead of merely souls any- 
where, we have men and women living in describa- 
ble homes. It would be hard to find in those other 
novels anything in the spirit of the following 
passage, which is fairly typical of much in 
this: 

"It was after the children's dinner 
and the two young women were still in the pres- 
ence of the crumpled tablecloth, the dispersed 
pinafores, the scraped dishes, the lingering odour 
of boiled food. Kate had asked, with ceremony, 
if she might put up a window a little, and Mrs. 
Condrip had replied, without it, that she might 
do as she liked. She often received such inquiries 
as if they reflected in a manner on the pure 
essence of her little ones. . . . Their mother 
had become for Kate — who took it just for the 
effect of being their mother — quite a different 
thing from the mild Marian of the past; Mr. 
Condrip's widow expansively obscured that im- 



THE BUSINESS OF WRITING 

age. She was little more than a ragged relic, 
a plain prosa^'c result of him, as if she had some- 
how been pulled through him as through an ob- 
stinate funnel, only to be left crumpled and 
useless and with nothing in her but what he 
accounted for." 

Not that the passage shows him at his best, but 
it shows him as at least concerned with the set- 
ting of his characters. 

It is not worth while to attempt an outline of 
the story. Those who have done so have disa- 
greed in essentials. It is impossible to hit off in 
a few words characters that James has picked out 
for their very complexity ; and the story counts 
for little with him as against the business of 
recording the play of mind. One does not 
take a watch to pieces merely to tell the 
time of day ; and with James analysis is the end in 
itself. 

If the obscurity of the language were due to 
the idea itself, and if while he tugs at an obsti- 
nate thought you could be sure it was worth the 
trouble, there would be no fault to find, but to 
him one thing seems as good as another when he 



THE BUSINESS OF WRITING 

is mousing around in a mind. It is a form of 
self-indulgence. He is as pleased with the mo- 
tives that lead nowhere as with anything else. 
It is his even emphasis that most misleads. He 
writes a staccato chronicle of things both great 
and small, like a constitutional history half made 
up of the measures that never passed. And in 
one respect he does not play fairly. He makes 
his characters read each other's minds from clues 
that he keeps to himself. To invent an irreverent 
instance, suppose I were a distinguished author 
with a psychological bent and wished to represent 
two young people as preternaturally acute. I 
might place them alone together and make them 
talk like this: 



"If " she sparkled. 

"If!" he asked. He had lurched from the meaning 
for a moment. 

"I might" she repHed abundantly. 

His eye had eaten the meaning — "Me !" he gloriously 
burst. 

"Precisely," she thrilled. "How splendidly you do 
understand." 



I, the distinguished author, versed in my own 
psychology — ^the springs of my own marionettes 
331 



THE BUSINESS OF WRITING 

— I understand it perfectly. For me there are 
words a-plenty. But is it fair to you, the 
reader? 

Nevertheless — and this is the main point about 
Henry James — by indefinable means and in spite 
of wearisome prolixity he often succeeds in his 
darkest books in producing very strange and 
powerful effects. It is a lucky man who can find 
a word for them. Things you had supposed in- 
communicable certainly come your way. These 
are the times when we are grateful to him for 
pottering away in his nebulous workshop among 
the things that are hard to express. Even when 
he fails we like him for making the attempt. We 
like him for going his own gait, though he leaves 
us straggling miles behind. We cannot afford at 
this time to blame any writer who is a little reck- 
less of the average mind. 

Consider the case of Browning and all that 
his lusty independence has done for us. Brown- 
ing was quite careless of the average mind; he 
would as lief wreck it. He was careless of any- 
body else's mind, so bent was he on indulging his 



THE BUSINESS OF WRITING 

own. His question was not, What will you have ? 
but What do I feel like doing? and readers had 
to take their chances, some to give him up as too 
deep, and others to beat their brains for inner 
meanings where there were none. He liked life 
so well that he prized its most vapid moments 
and expressed his mind at its best and at its 
worst, wrote sometimes as other men drum on win- 
dow-panes, catalogued a lot of objects he liked 
the look of, relaxed in verse, ate in it, sometimes 
slept in it, used it, in short, for so many strange 
little personal purposes, that reading it some- 
times seems an intrusion. Hence, he is quite as 
much a puzzle to the too thoughtful as he is to 
those who prefer not to think, for a great man's 
nonsense is sure to drive his commentators mad 
looking for a message. Browning differed from 
others not so much in the greatness of his mind as 
in the fact that he showed more of it. He seems 
obscure sometimes because people are unprepared 
for that degree of confidence. Then, there are 
certain preconceived notions as to the limits of 
literature, an expectation of large, plain things, 
333 



THE BUSINESS OF WRITING 

of truth with a door-knob, of smooth, symmetri- 
cal thoughts, not at all in the shape they come to 
the mind, but neatly trimmed for others to see 
when they leave it. No living man understands 
Browning ; but for that matter, few men under- 
stand their wives. It is not fatal to enjoyment. 
People who are perfectly clear to each other are 
simply keeping things back. Any man would be 
a mystery if you could see him from the inside, 
and Browning puzzles us chiefly because we are 
not accustomed to seeing a mind exposed to view. 
It is the man's presence, not his message, that we 
care for in Browning's books ; his zest for every- 
thing, his best foot and his worst foot, his deep- 
est feelings and his foolishness, and the tag-ends 
of his dreams. They are not the greatest poems 
in the world, but there was the greatest pleasure 
in the making of them. It is just the place for 
a writer to go and forget his minor literary 
duties, the sense of his demanding public, the 
obligation of the shining phrase, the need of mak- 
ing editorial cats jump, the standing orders for a 
jeu d^esprit. 



THE BUSINESS OF WRITING 

It is also the place for a reader to go who is 
a little weary of the books which are written 
with such patient regard for the spiritual limita- 
tions of the public. And part of the obscurity of 
Henry James springs from the same pleasing 
and honorable egotism. 



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